Scientist says we’ve got whale song all wrong - CBC

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I'm Marina, a marine biologist and ocean storyteller who has spent way too many happy hours listening to hydrophone recordings at two in the morning and calling it research. This podcast is where we dive into the world of whales and dolphins — their songs, their cultures, their family bonds, and the incredible science working to understand what they're actually saying to each other. A huge thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps organizations bring A I into their real-world workflows in smart, meaningful ways; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to full system-on-chip design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses shaping the future of the silicon industry. These are the folks helping build the tools that, honestly, are changing what's possible in ocean science too. Alright — today we have a scientist flipping everything we thought we knew about whale song, some remarkable environmental detective work happening in the fjords of Norway, and a dolphin in Galveston Bay who is going to stop you in your tracks. Let's go deep. Marina: So let's start with something that genuinely made me sit up straight when I came across it this week — because a scientist is making the case that we have whale song fundamentally wrong. And I don't mean a small tweak to the margins. I mean the framing itself. Marina: Here's what most of us have been told, and honestly what I was taught too: humpback whale song is a male thing. Males sing. Females don't. The song is about reproduction — it's a display, like a peacock's tail but acoustic. Males compete, females choose, and the song is the medium through which that drama plays out. Clean story, right? Marina: But researchers have been pushing back on this for a while now, and the argument is getting sharper. The issue is that we've built this whole interpretation of whale song on a framework borrowed from how we think about birdsong — and birds and whales are doing very different things in very different worlds. Marina: Think about what it actually takes to sing a humpback song. These aren't little flourishes. A full humpback song can last for hours. Some recordings go on for twenty hours straight. The whale doesn't surface to breathe in a way that interrupts the song — they have this extraordinary ability to recirculate air through their respiratory system and keep going. And the song itself is structured in this deeply layered way: sounds organized into phrases, phrases into themes, themes into sessions. Marina: And here's the part that really gets me — the song changes. Not randomly. It evolves, culturally, across populations. New phrases appear, spread, and eventually the whole population adopts them. Within a few years, the old song is gone and something new has taken its place. This is cultural transmission on a massive scale. One researcher described it as like watching a hit song go viral across an ocean basin — except the ocean basin is the Pacific, and the timeline is years, not weeks. Marina: So the critique being raised now is this: if we've been filtering all of our interpretations through a reproductive-display lens — assuming it's all about males attracting females — we might be missing enormous amounts of what's actually happening. What if song serves navigational purposes? Social bonding? Identity signaling? What if females vocalize in ways we've been undervaluing or misclassifying because we weren't looking for it? The scientist making waves with this argument is essentially saying: let's question the whole model. And honestly? That's exactly the kind of science I find most exciting — not the kind that confirms what we already think, but the kind that asks whether we've been looking through the wrong window. Marina: Okay, so we just talked about how humpback song might be more complicated — and more culturally rich — than we thought. And that brings us perfectly into our second thread today, which is about the science working to actually decode what cetaceans are saying. And there is no story in this space more ambitious right now than what's happening in the waters off Dominica. Marina: Project CETI — that's C-E-T-I, standing for Cetacean Translation Initiative — is an effort that has genuinely caught the attention of some of the biggest names in A I, machine learning, and linguistics. The goal is, and I say this knowing how wild it sounds: to use A I to understand what sperm whales are saying to each other. Marina: Sperm whales communicate through clicks. Not musical songs the way humpbacks do, but these sharp, percussive patterns called codas. A coda is a short sequence of clicks — maybe five clicks, maybe fifteen — and different codas seem to mean different things in different social contexts. Sperm whale societies are matrilineal, which means they're organized around mothers and grandmothers, and females spend their entire lives within the same social unit. They know each other deeply. And their click conversations happen constantly when they're together. Marina: What Project CETI is doing is deploying an enormous listening infrastructure — bio-logging tags on individual whales, underwater microphones, even some A I-equipped fish-shaped robots — to collect millions of coda recordings in their full social context. The idea is that if you have enough data, and you apply the same natural language processing tools that have transformed how A I handles human language, you might start to find structure. Meaning. Maybe even something like grammar. Marina: Now — and I want to be honest here — we are not at the point of translating whale clicks into sentences. Anyone who tells you that has gotten ahead of the science. But what researchers have already found is genuinely extraordinary. Sperm whale codas show what linguists call combinatorial structure — meaning the clicks aren't random, they're organized, and small variations in pattern seem to carry different information. There's a paper published in 2024 showing that the complexity of the sperm whale coda system is far richer than previously understood, with something like a rubato, an ornamentation, that may function like emphasis or context-marking in human speech. Marina: And this connects beautifully to a new study just out from Norway — researchers used environmental DNA to investigate what male sperm whales are actually doing at their foraging sites in the Norwegian fjords. Environmental DNA, or eDNA, is this gorgeous technique where you sample the water itself and detect genetic material that's been shed by animals — skin cells, waste, mucus — and from that you can reconstruct who's been there and what they've been eating. The study found evidence of trophic links — feeding connections — that help explain why these male sperm whales, who live largely solitary lives away from their tropical family groups, keep returning to the same cold northern waters. They're tracking prey, building knowledge of productive feeding grounds. It's an intelligence story as much as an ecology story. These animals remember. They plan. And the question of whether they communicate that knowledge — whether a whale can, in some sense, tell another whale where to find food — is exactly what projects like CETI are positioning themselves to explore. Marina: I also want to mention something that doesn't always get enough airtime: the role of visual science alongside the acoustic work. NOAA Fisheries has been publishing some of their large whale research in photographs recently, and if you haven't seen this kind of work — drone footage, tagging photos, aerial surveys — it's breathtaking. Every image is a data point. The shape of a fluke, a scar pattern, the angle of a breach. Science and wonder, completely inseparable. Marina: Alright, our third story today is the one that I think is going to stay with you. It comes from Galveston Bay in Texas, and it involves a bottlenose dolphin that was recently spotted — alive, active, apparently healthy — with no tail. Marina: Let me just sit with that for a second. No tail. A dolphin's tail, the flukes, is everything. It's the engine. It's how they accelerate, how they dive, how they leap. The entire biomechanics of a dolphin's life is built around that powerful up-and-down fluke motion. And this animal doesn't have one. Marina: Now, tailless dolphins have been documented before — there's a famous case of a bottlenose called Winter, who became the subject of a film and lived for years at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida after losing her tail in a crab trap. Winter learned to swim with a side-to-side motion, which actually caused some spinal concerns over time — but she survived for years with a prosthetic tail that researchers and engineers designed specifically for her. She became a symbol of resilience and of the intersection between human care and cetacean adaptability. Marina: This Galveston Bay dolphin appears to be wild. And that changes the stakes enormously. In the wild, without human feeding or medical support, surviving without a tail requires the animal to find another way to move, to hunt, to stay with its group. Bottlenose dolphins are intensely social — they live in fission-fusion societies where individuals come and go from groups but maintain long-term relationships over years and even decades. Research has shown that dolphins with injuries or disabilities sometimes receive what looks very much like support from their pods — other animals slowing down, staying close, even helping an injured individual surface to breathe. Marina: We don't yet know the full story of this Galveston Bay dolphin — how it lost its tail, how long it's been surviving this way, whether it has a social group around it. But its presence, spotted and reported, means it is out there. Moving through the bay. Navigating a life that by any mechanical logic shouldn't be possible. Marina: And that to me is the cetacean-and-people story at its most raw. Not a rescue, not an intervention — just a wild animal living on the edge of what we thought was survivable, and humans bearing witness. There's something about that that I find almost unbearably moving. The bay goes about its business — the boats, the fishing lines, the cargo traffic — and somewhere in that water, a dolphin with no tail is figuring it out. Marina: I also can't tell this story without mentioning the thirty million dollars that's just been committed to North Atlantic right whale research — because the people-and-cetaceans relationship isn't only about individual animals. Right whales are critically endangered, fewer than four hundred individuals remaining, and the primary killers are ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear — particularly lobster and crab trap lines. This new funding, which could reach thirty million dollars, is aimed at research that might actually help both the whales and the lobster industry find a path forward. Ropeless fishing technology, acoustic deterrents, better detection systems. It's a rare and hopeful story of conservation funding that treats the fishing communities not as the enemy but as partners in the solution. Because if the people who work these waters can be part of saving the right whale — and there are fishers who genuinely want that — then we might actually have a chance. Marina: That's the thing about this work that keeps me going. Every story we cover on this show — the songs, the cultures, the A I listening for meaning in a sperm whale's click — it all comes back to relationship. Our relationship with these animals. What we owe them. What they might be trying to say, if only we learn how to listen. Marina: The ocean is not silent. It never was. We just haven't had the ears for it — until now. Marina: Thank you so much for spending this time with me today. Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three organizations helping build the technology that makes tomorrow's science possible, including the A I that might one day help us truly understand the voices of the deep. If this episode moved you or made you curious, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, share it with someone who loves the ocean, and check the link in show notes for more on all of today's stories. Stay curious, stay wonder-filled — and keep listening.