Fur the Greater Good: Aquarium Encounters opens the door for Dolphin Research Center harbor seals - Keys Weekly Newspapers

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — the podcast that dives beneath the surface, into the extraordinary world of whales and dolphins. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator, and honestly, this is my favorite thing I get to do — share the stories of these animals who fill the ocean with sound, culture, and what I truly believe is a kind of wisdom we're only just beginning to understand. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to today's sponsors. Ada, who helps organizations integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense. Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants taking ideas all the way from A I to system-on-chip. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. We are so grateful to have them with us. Marina: Today's episode has everything. We're going to travel through time with a humpback whale off Martha's Vineyard. We're going to look at some of the most exciting A I tools being built to decode what animals — and especially cetaceans — are actually saying. And we've got a beautiful story about connection across species lines, one that starts in the Florida Keys with some very charming harbor seals. Let's go. Marina: Okay, so — thread one. Voices of the Deep. And I want to start by asking you to do something for me. Close your eyes for just a second, if you can safely do that wherever you are. Imagine you're on a boat. Small boat. Atlantic Ocean. It's early morning, the water is that deep grey-blue, and the person next to you lowers a hydrophone — that's an underwater microphone — over the side of the boat. And then you put on the headphones. And the ocean... speaks. Marina: That's what researchers and writers off the coast of Martha's Vineyard have been experiencing with humpback whales. There's a beautiful piece in the Vineyard Gazette — they call it "time traveling with a humpback whale" — and that phrase stopped me cold when I read it. Time traveling. Because that's actually not far from the truth. Marina: Here's what I mean. Humpback whale songs are among the most complex, most haunting, most mysterious sounds produced by any animal on Earth. The males sing — long, elaborate sequences of sounds, organized into phrases, phrases into themes, themes into songs. And a full song can last for twenty minutes. Sometimes longer. And then they just... start again. Marina: But here's the part that gets me every single time. These songs change. Slowly, across months and years, the songs evolve. New sounds get introduced, old ones drop out. And the really astonishing thing is that all the males in a population sing roughly the same song — and they all update it together, like some vast, slow, living collaboration happening across hundreds of miles of open ocean. Marina: Researchers have tracked these song changes over decades. Roger Payne and Scott McVay were among the first to formally describe humpback song back in 1971 — and they noted even then that the songs weren't static. They were shifting. Evolving. And the question that nobody has fully answered yet is: why? Is it about attracting females? Competing with other males? Practicing? Expressing something we don't have a word for yet? Marina: What we do know is that listening to a humpback's song recorded today, and then listening to one recorded thirty years ago from the same ocean basin, is a little like listening to two different dialects of the same ancient language. The bones are the same. The soul is the same. But the details have drifted, transformed, been reborn. Time travel, indeed. Marina: And it's not just humpbacks. Sperm whales have their codas — these short, rhythmic click patterns that groups use almost like signatures. Belugas have such a complex vocal range that sailors once called them "canaries of the sea." Orcas have dialects so distinct that researchers can identify which pod an animal belongs to just by listening. Every species, its own voice. Every voice, a world. Marina: The reason this matters — beyond the sheer wonder of it — is that sound is everything in the ocean. Light fades fast underwater. Smell diffuses. But sound? Sound travels magnificently in water. Faster than in air, and sometimes across extraordinary distances. For whales, sound is their primary sense, their social fabric, their GPS, their history. When we record these animals, we're not just capturing noise. We're capturing lives. Marina: Okay. Thread two. Culture and Decoding. And this is where things get genuinely exciting — and a little mind-bending — because the science of understanding what cetaceans are saying has just taken a leap forward that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago. Marina: There's a piece going around right now from Canadian Geographic, titled "Out of our depth: speaking with whales." And I love that title, because it captures both meanings. We are, quite literally, out of our depth — in the ocean, surrounded by creatures whose communication systems may be as rich and as layered as anything we've built. And yet we are also, increasingly, rising to meet that depth with some remarkable new tools. Marina: The project I want to talk about is Project CETI — that stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative. And it is exactly what it sounds like. A multi-disciplinary team of scientists, linguists, cryptographers, machine learning researchers, and marine biologists, all working together with one audacious goal: to decode sperm whale communication using A I. Marina: Sperm whales were chosen for a reason. They're highly social. They live in matrilineal family units — grandmothers, mothers, daughters, aunts, all traveling together, caring for calves together. And they communicate using codas — those click sequences I mentioned earlier. There are dozens of distinct coda types, and different clans use different repertoires, passed down through generations. That's culture. Documented, transmitted, inherited culture. Marina: What Project CETI is doing is deploying underwater recording equipment — hydrophones, even tags on the whales themselves — to capture enormous quantities of sperm whale communication in the wild, off the island of Dominica in the Eastern Caribbean. We're talking about the scale of data collection that A I needs to work with: tens of thousands of codas, recorded in context, alongside behavioral observations about what the whales are actually doing when they make those sounds. Marina: The A I piece is crucial. Because whale communication doesn't map neatly onto human language. You can't just build a dictionary. What machine learning can do — particularly the kind of large-scale pattern recognition that's transformed how we understand human language — is find structure we wouldn't see with our eyes and ears alone. Relationships between sounds. Context. Sequence. Variation. The kind of deep pattern that might tell us: this coda means something different depending on who says it, or when, or to whom. Marina: And the Economic Times recently ran a piece asking the big question: what are animals saying? They highlighted three emerging A I tools being developed not just for cetaceans but across the animal kingdom — from bees to elephants to, yes, whales and dolphins. The thread running through all of them is this idea that we've been surrounded by communication all along, and we've just lacked the tools to listen properly. Marina: Now — I want to be careful here, because I think it's important. We are not on the verge of a universal animal translator. The researchers involved in this work are the first to say that. What they're working toward is understanding the structure of these communication systems — whether they have the hallmarks of language, like combinatoriality, where small units combine into larger meaningful structures. That's a profound scientific question, and the answer — whatever it turns out to be — will change how we understand minds in the universe. Marina: And here's the cultural layer that I find so moving. Sperm whale clans don't just have different codas — they behave differently. They have different traditions around how they care for calves, different patterns of socializing. Young sperm whales learn from their elders. Specific behaviors, specific sounds, passed down. If a culture can be lost — and it can, when populations are decimated by whaling or ship strikes — then understanding it becomes not just a scientific act, but an act of preservation. Marina: Thread three. A Cetacean-and-People Story. And this one, I have to say, made me smile in a way I really needed this week. Marina: So — the Dolphin Research Center. If you don't know it, it's a non-profit facility in Grassy Key, in the Florida Keys, dedicated to marine mammal research and education. They've been doing incredible work for decades with Atlantic bottlenose dolphins, studying communication, cognition, social behavior. Real, serious science, combined with a genuine ethic of care for the animals who live there. Marina: Now, the Dolphin Research Center has a new project underway, and it involves some unexpected guests: harbor seals. A nearby facility, Aquarium Encounters, has been working with the Dolphin Research Center to give their harbor seals access to new experiences — including, carefully and thoughtfully, introductions to the research environment at DRC. Marina: Harbor seals, just so you know, are not cetaceans — they're pinnipeds, in the same broad family as sea lions and walruses. But they are smart, curious, social animals, and they have their own vocal lives — barks, growls, grunts, underwater trills. And the reason this collaboration caught my attention is what it represents: this growing recognition that marine mammal science is enriched when animals have agency and novelty and connection in their lives, when we treat their wellbeing as central to the science, not separate from it. Marina: The staff at Aquarium Encounters noticed that their seals were curious — they wanted more. More stimulation, more interaction, more of whatever seals find fascinating about the world. And rather than ignoring that, they picked up the phone and called the Dolphin Research Center. That call led to what they're describing as an enrichment partnership — a collaborative, careful introduction of the seals to new environments and new relationships. Marina: Now, I want to be honest — this is an early-stage program, and we don't yet have published research outcomes from it. But what moves me about this story is the spirit behind it. The acknowledgment that these animals are not props, not just subjects. They're beings with preferences, with curiosity, with something that functions very much like a desire for connection. Marina: And speaking of connection — that's actually the through-line in so many of the most important moments in cetacean science. Roger Payne didn't just study humpback whales from a distance. He listened to them late at night on a sailboat, and was so undone by what he heard that he devoted his life to their protection. The researchers at Project CETI will tell you that sitting in the water off Dominica, watching a sperm whale look back at you — that changes something. That's not a data point. That's a conversation you didn't expect to have. Marina: There's a piece in Orion Magazine right now called "Call and Response" — and that phrase captures something I think about a lot. Because the history of humans and cetaceans has not always been a kind one. Whaling decimated populations. Navy sonar has caused terrible harm. Plastic and noise pollution are ongoing crises. But within that history, there is also this other story — the story of people who heard something in the ocean and couldn't look away. Couldn't stop listening. Who built their lives around the idea that these voices matter. Marina: And increasingly, the tools we're building — the A I, the hydrophones, the long-term population studies — are being built in service of that idea. Not just to satisfy curiosity, though curiosity is a fine and noble thing. But because if we understand what sperm whales are saying to each other, if we understand that there are dialects and cultures and grandmother whales who carry the knowledge of where to find food in a bad year — then maybe it becomes a little harder to dismiss them. A little harder to let them disappear. Marina: That's the hope, anyway. And hope, in this work, is not naive. It's necessary. Marina: So. That's our episode. A humpback whale whose song carries the echo of decades. A team of scientists and A I researchers working to hear what sperm whales say to their daughters. And a group of harbor seals in the Florida Keys, knocking on a new door, asking — with the particular eloquence of a curious animal — what else is out there? Marina: I find myself thinking, more and more, that the ocean is full of voices we haven't learned to hear yet. And that might be the most important listening project our species has ever undertaken. These animals have been here so much longer than we have. They have languages and cultures and social bonds that have been tested by time and ocean and loss. And they are still singing. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. If this episode moved you, or made you look at the ocean a little differently, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who needs a little wonder in their week. All the sources and links for today's stories are in the show notes — the link is in show notes — and I will be back soon with more from the deep. Until then, stay curious. Keep listening.