How a Whale’s Dive Shapes Its Song - Syracuse University Today

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I'm so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator, and this is the show where we dive into the world of whales and dolphins — their songs, their cultures, their remarkable minds, and the science working to understand what they're actually saying to each other. Marina: A huge thank you to today's sponsors: Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their real-world workflows; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts working across everything from A I to full SoC design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with an incredible portfolio spanning the silicon industry. We couldn't make this show without them. Marina: And today — oh, today is a good one. We've got brand new science on how a whale physically shapes its song as it dives deeper into the ocean. We've got a jaw-dropping archival discovery — a recording of humpback whale song from 1949, possibly the oldest ever found. We've got a story of wonder and gray whales in Baja California. And we've got the fascinating story of an Indian computer scientist leading a global A I race to decode sperm whale language. Let's go. Marina: So let's start with something that I find almost poetic — the idea that a whale's song isn't just coming from inside the animal, it's being shaped in real time by the ocean itself, by pressure, by depth, by the sheer physics of the dive. Marina: Researchers at Syracuse University have been looking closely at how humpback whales — those famously elaborate singers — actually produce and modify their vocalizations as they move through the water column. And what they've found adds a whole new layer to how we understand whale song. Marina: Here's the thing about humpbacks: they don't have vocal cords the way we do. They produce sound through a specialized structure in their larynx — a sort of U-shaped fold of tissue that vibrates as air is recycled through it. No air is actually released. The whale is essentially singing on a closed loop. Marina: But as a whale dives — as the pressure around its body increases — that system changes. The physics change. And researchers are finding evidence that the whales are actively compensating, adjusting how they produce sound to maintain the songs they need to sing. Marina: Think about what that means. These animals are performing a kind of real-time acoustic engineering. They're deep in the ocean, in the dark, under enormous pressure, and they're still producing these incredibly complex, structured songs — and they may be actively tuning their own biology to do it. Marina: Humpback whale song is already one of the most astonishing things in the natural world. Males sing these long, elaborate compositions — phrases that build into themes, themes that build into songs that can last for hours. And here's the part that never stops amazing me: all the males in a given population sing essentially the same song. And that song changes over time. Slowly, collaboratively, culturally. New phrases get introduced, spread across the population, and eventually replace the old ones. Marina: So when we talk about how a dive shapes a song, we're not just talking about acoustics. We're talking about an animal that is simultaneously managing enormous physical pressure, navigating the deep ocean, and producing culturally shared, dynamically evolving music. That is not a simple creature doing a simple thing. That is something extraordinary. Marina: And it raises questions that researchers are only just beginning to ask — does singing at depth sound different to other whales? Are there messages that are only legible at certain depths? Is the dive itself part of the communication? We don't know yet. But I love that we're asking. Marina: Now — let me take you somewhere very specific. Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The year is 1949. And somewhere off that coast, a humpback whale is singing. Marina: We know this because someone recorded it. And that recording — discovered recently in an archive — may be the oldest known recording of humpback whale song in existence. It predates the recordings that scientists had long believed were the earliest by decades. Marina: For a long time, the story we told was that humpback song was "discovered" in the 1960s, when biologist Roger Payne and his colleagues began recording whales off Bermuda and realized that what they were hearing wasn't random noise — it was structured, repeating, musical. Payne's 1970 album, "Songs of the Humpback Whale," became one of the most influential recordings ever released. It sparked a generation of ocean conservation advocacy. It helped drive the global moratorium on commercial whaling. Marina: But now there's this 1949 recording, found on Cape Cod, and it rewrites the timeline. Someone — likely a researcher or a Navy-affiliated scientist working with underwater hydrophones — captured a humpback singing, and that recording sat in an archive for over seventy years before anyone recognized what it was. Marina: I keep thinking about that. A whale singing in 1949. The world had just come through the Second World War. The Cold War was beginning. And out in the Atlantic Ocean, a humpback whale was doing what humpback whales do — singing its long, haunting, looping song into the deep — and for a brief moment, a human was listening, and the sound was preserved. Marina: That whale is long gone now. But its voice survived. And when researchers play that recording today, they can actually analyze it — compare it to modern humpback song, look for similarities and differences, ask whether the songs have changed over seventy-five years of cultural evolution and population pressure and the dramatic reduction and slow recovery of humpback populations after commercial whaling. Marina: Humpbacks were decimated. In the Southern Hemisphere alone, Soviet whaling fleets killed hundreds of thousands of them through the mid-twentieth century — numbers we only fully understood when secret Soviet whaling records were finally made public in the 1990s. These animals went from abundant to functionally endangered in some populations within a few decades. Marina: And yet — the songs survived. The culture survived. When humpback populations began to recover after the 1986 moratorium, the whales were still singing. Still passing their music down. That 1949 recording is now a window into that cultural continuity — a direct acoustic link to a world before the worst of the slaughter. Marina: I find that genuinely moving. And I think it matters — not just scientifically, but as a reminder of what we almost lost, and what we still have the chance to protect. Marina: Okay — I want to bring in A I here, because this is where the science gets genuinely exciting and also genuinely humbling, because the more we learn about cetacean communication, the more we realize how much we don't understand. Marina: Let me tell you about Pratyusha Sharma. She's a computer scientist — originally from India, now working in the United States — and she's one of the leading figures in what might be the most ambitious animal communication project ever attempted: Project CETI, which stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative. Marina: Project CETI is focused on sperm whales. Specifically, on the clicks that sperm whales use to communicate — sounds called codas. Sperm whales are fascinating communicators. They live in matrilineal family groups, deeply bonded, with rich social lives. And they communicate through these patterns of clicks — rhythmic, structured, varying in tempo and spacing and combination in ways that researchers believe carry real meaning. Marina: Pratyusha Sharma and her colleagues are applying machine learning — the same kind of A I that underlies large language models — to the problem of decoding those codas. The approach is to gather an enormous dataset of sperm whale vocalizations, annotate them with behavioral and social context, and then train models to find patterns that human researchers might miss. Marina: It's an extraordinary undertaking. And Sharma's background in computer science and natural language processing brings tools to the problem that marine biologists alone couldn't easily deploy. She represents this really exciting convergence — oceanography meeting A I, biology meeting machine learning — that's happening across cetacean research right now. Marina: The honest truth is that we don't know yet whether sperm whale codas constitute a language in the way we use that word. They may. They may not. They may be something in between — something that doesn't map neatly onto human categories at all. But what Project CETI is doing is creating the foundation to actually find out. Rigorous data collection, ethical field work, and A I tools sophisticated enough to detect structure that we couldn't see before. Marina: And there's something I find philosophically thrilling about this. We built A I to understand human language. Now we're turning it toward the ocean and asking — what if there's something else here worth understanding? What if intelligence took a different shape in the deep water, and we just haven't had the tools to see it until now? Marina: Pratyusha Sharma is one of the people building those tools. And I think in twenty years, we're going to look back at this moment as the beginning of something genuinely transformative in how humans understand other minds on this planet. Marina: And now — let's go somewhere beautiful. Baja California, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. The lagoons there — Laguna San Ignacio, Ojo de Liebre — are the winter nursery grounds for gray whales. These animals migrate from the Arctic, thousands of miles, to give birth in the warm shallow waters of Baja. Marina: National Geographic recently ran a story about people going to Baja to find whales — and to find awe. And I want to talk about that, because the gray whale story in Baja is one of the most extraordinary cetacean-and-human stories I know. Marina: Gray whales were hunted to near extinction — twice. First by Yankee whalers in the nineteenth century, who found their breeding lagoons and slaughtered them there. The lagoons ran red. The whales were called "devil fish" by the whalers, not because they were evil but because mother gray whales would fiercely defend their calves, ramming boats, fighting back. And still they were nearly gone. Marina: They recovered, slowly. Then modern industrial whaling nearly finished them again in the twentieth century. And then — protections. The eastern Pacific gray whale population was removed from the U.S. Endangered Species List in 1994. It was one of the first genuine success stories in marine mammal conservation. Marina: But here's the part of the story that stops me every time. In the 1970s and 80s, something began happening in those Baja lagoons that nobody fully expected. Gray whales — the same species that had been hunted there, that had every reason to associate humans with death and danger — began approaching the small fishing boats. Voluntarily. Curiously. Marina: Fishermen reported whales surfacing next to their boats, nudging them gently, lifting their heads to be touched. A fisherman named Pachico Mayoral is often credited as one of the first to reach out and touch one of these approaching whales, in the early 1970s. And the whale didn't flee. It seemed to want the contact. Marina: Today, the Baja lagoons are famous for what visitors call "friendly whale" encounters. Whale watching boats go out, and gray whales — especially mothers with calves — approach the boats and allow themselves to be touched, to be looked at from inches away, to interact. Mothers sometimes lift their calves toward the boats, as if introducing them. Marina: Nobody fully knows why. Some researchers think it may be curiosity — gray whales are intelligent, social animals, and the lagoons are relatively safe now. Some think the mothers may be deliberately exposing their calves to humans in a controlled way, socializing them to the boats they'll encounter throughout their lives. Some think it's simply play. Maybe it's all of those things. Marina: What strikes me is what it says about these animals' capacity to update their relationship with humans. They were hunted. Devastatingly. And yet, within a generation or two of protection, some of them began approaching us again — not with aggression, not with fear, but with something that looks very much like curiosity and openness. Marina: That is not nothing. That is an animal choosing to extend something like trust across a history that gave it every reason not to. And when you're sitting in a small boat in a Baja lagoon, and a gray whale surfaces next to you and looks at you with one great dark eye — I am told there is nothing quite like it. People weep. People are changed by it. Marina: That's what awe does. And I think that's what the ocean is trying to tell us, if we'll only listen. Marina: What a day it has been in the deep. We've heard how physics and biology intertwine in a humpback's song as it dives. We've listened, across seventy-five years, to a voice preserved from 1949 — a whale singing before most of us were born. We've met an A I researcher bringing machine learning to bear on the oldest question: what are they saying? And we've sat in a small boat in Baja California as a gray whale surfaces and decides, remarkably, to say hello. Marina: These animals have voices. They have cultures. They have memories and bonds and songs that outlast individual lives. The more science looks, the more it finds. And I believe — I genuinely believe — that we are at the beginning of understanding something profound about the other minds that share this planet with us. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three companies investing in the kind of intelligence, human and artificial, that helps us understand our world a little better. Marina: If this episode moved you, please subscribe, share it with someone who loves the ocean, and leave us a review — it makes an enormous difference. All the links and sources for today's stories are in the show notes — check the link in show notes for everything we talked about today. Marina: Stay curious. Stay in wonder. And keep listening to the deep.