DOLPHIN RESEARCH CENTER DOCUMENTARY EARNS INTERNATIONAL RECOGNITION - Keys Weekly Newspapers

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I'm so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator who has spent years falling deeper in love with the ocean's most remarkable minds: whales and dolphins. This show is where we dive into their songs, their families, their cultures, and the astonishing science working to understand what they're actually saying to each other. Marina: Before we get into it, a huge thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in smart, practical ways; Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — a silicon development consulting firm working across everything from A I to SoC design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of companies spanning the silicon industry. These folks make Deep Voices possible, and I'm genuinely grateful. Marina: On today's episode — a documentary about a beloved dolphin research center gets recognized on the world stage, A I cameras are giving us an incredible new window into the secret lives of gray whales, a mother orca carries a heartbreaking burden off the coast of Vancouver Island, thirty million dollars lands for right whale research in the waters off New England, and — the one that made my jaw drop this week — a vessel they're calling the Waymo of the sea is out there right now tracking sperm whale conversations in real time. Let's go. Marina: Okay, so let's start with voices — because that is, at the heart of it, what this whole show is about. And this week, the story that stopped me in my tracks came from Popular Science, which reported on what they called the "Waymo of the sea" — an autonomous vessel being used to track sperm whale conversations. And I want to sit with that for a second, because what we're talking about here is genuinely extraordinary. Marina: Sperm whales are the largest toothed animals on Earth. The males can reach eighteen meters long — that's nearly sixty feet. And they communicate using these sharp, rhythmic clicking sounds called codas. Not the long, haunting songs of humpbacks — something more like a percussive, coded language. Click, click-click, pause, click. Researchers have been studying sperm whale codas for decades, and what's emerged is this remarkable picture: different groups of sperm whales have different coda repertoires. Like dialects. Like accents. Groups that live near each other and associate with each other share similar codas. Groups that are geographically separated sound different. That is cultural transmission. That is something being learned and passed down. Marina: And now we have an autonomous surface vehicle — essentially a robotic boat — that can follow these animals quietly, without the noise and disruption of a traditional research vessel, and record their conversations over extended periods. The project tracking this is called Project CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative — and they are using hydrophones, machine learning, and this new generation of autonomous tools to collect an unprecedented volume of sperm whale communication data. The goal, and they say this openly, is to eventually decode what sperm whales are saying to each other. Not metaphorically. Literally. Using A I trained on enough data to find the patterns, the grammar, the meaning — if it's there. Marina: And here's what gives me chills. Sperm whales live in deep social groups — mostly females and their young, with males roaming more widely. The females stay together for life. They babysit each other's calves. They have been observed apparently teaching younger whales how to dive and how to forage. When you hear a group of sperm whales clicking back and forth — and I have been lucky enough to hear recordings of this — there is a quality to it that feels, I don't know how else to say it, conversational. Like something is being exchanged. Project CETI is betting that something genuinely is. And with an autonomous vessel that can stay out there, quietly listening, for far longer than a crewed ship — we might finally have the tool to find out. Marina: Now let's talk about culture and decoding — and about a very different kind of technology being used to watch cetaceans in a very different part of the world. ABC7 in the Bay Area reported this week on A I cameras being deployed by researchers to study gray whale behavior in the waters off California. And this one is close to my heart, because gray whales have one of the most incredible life stories of any animal on the planet. Marina: Every year, gray whales make a round trip migration of up to twenty thousand kilometers — from their feeding grounds in the cold, rich waters of the Arctic, down to the warm, shallow lagoons of Baja California in Mexico, where they give birth, and then all the way back. It is the longest migration of any mammal. And along the California coast, they pass through in pulses — southbound in winter, northbound in spring — and researchers have been watching and counting them for decades. But watching from shore or from boats has real limits. You miss a lot. Animals dive, they move, conditions change. Marina: What these new A I camera systems can do is watch continuously, process images in real time, and flag and identify individual animals and behaviors in ways that would take a human team enormous resources to replicate. We're talking about being able to track how individual whales behave near the coast, how they respond to boat traffic, when they're feeding versus traveling, how mothers and calves interact. That kind of longitudinal, detailed behavioral data is gold. It's the kind of data that lets you ask — and answer — questions about culture and learning. Because gray whales, like sperm whales, like orcas, are not just following instinct. They learn from each other. Marina: There's a famous example from the gray whale lagoons in Baja — Laguna San Ignacio specifically — where in the 1970s, gray whales began doing something that had never been reliably documented before. They started approaching human boats. Not fleeing. Approaching. And eventually, making contact — nudging boats, allowing people to touch them, bringing their calves over. Scientists call them "friendly whales." And here's the cultural piece: that behavior spread. It wasn't just one curious individual. It propagated through the population, likely through social learning. Young whales watched older whales interact with boats and learned that this was something you could do. That is culture. That is a behavior transmitted between individuals, not written in genes. Marina: And now, with A I cameras on the California coast, researchers can build on that legacy — watching, recording, learning — in ways that are faster, more continuous, and more detailed than ever before. I find it beautiful, honestly, that we're turning our own most sophisticated tools toward the task of understanding theirs. Marina: And speaking of understanding — this week there was also big news out of New England, where thirty million dollars in federal funding has been announced for North Atlantic right whale research. Mainebiz reported on this, and I want to make sure we talk about it, because the North Atlantic right whale is one of the most critically endangered large animals on Earth. There are fewer than four hundred of them left. Fewer than four hundred. In the entire ocean. Marina: Right whales got their name — grimly — because whalers considered them the "right" whale to hunt. Slow, coastal, they float when dead. They were hunted to the edge of extinction, and while commercial whaling of them ended, the threats did not. Today the two biggest killers of right whales are entanglement in fishing gear — particularly lobster and crab trap lines — and vessel strikes. And the funding announced this week is specifically aimed at better understanding right whale behavior and movement, which has direct implications for where fishing gear is deployed and how ships are routed. Marina: The lobster industry connection mentioned in the Mainebiz piece is real and important. This isn't a simple story of fishermen versus whales — it's far more complicated than that. Lobster fishing in Maine is a cultural tradition going back generations. Families depend on it. And the fishermen I've spoken to over the years — most of them want the whales to survive. Nobody wants to be the person whose gear killed one of four hundred remaining animals. So research that gives everyone better information about where right whales actually are, when and why they move, what makes certain areas dangerous at certain times of year — that research serves the whales and the fishing communities. That thirty million dollars, if spent well, could genuinely matter. Marina: But I want to close this thread with something that is not about policy or funding — something that is just about the animal itself. Right whales communicate with low-frequency calls, mostly below the range of human hearing without amplification. They make upcalls — a rising tone used to contact other whales. They make gunshot sounds — explosive, short, used by males apparently in social contexts. Right whale mothers and calves whisper to each other. Literally. Researchers discovered that right whale mother-calf pairs use quieter, shorter calls when they're together — possibly to avoid attracting males or predators. They hush their babies. When I learned that, I had to put down what I was reading and just sit with it for a moment. Marina: Okay, now for our people story — and this one is hard. Because sometimes the cetacean-and-people story isn't a rescue or a wonder. Sometimes it's a grief story. And this week, The Inertia reported that an orca mother was spotted off Vancouver Island carrying her dead calf. Again. Marina: If you've been following the Southern Resident killer whales, you may remember the story of Tahlequah — also known as J35 — who in 2018 carried her dead newborn calf for seventeen days and over a thousand miles. The world watched. Scientists, journalists, people who had never thought much about orcas before — everyone watched. And it broke something open in public understanding of what these animals feel, what these animals are. Marina: The Southern Residents are a small, tight-knit population — three pods, J, K, and L pod — that live in the waters around the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia. They are critically endangered. Their primary prey is Chinook salmon, which has collapsed due to dam construction, habitat loss, and overfishing. When salmon are scarce, the whales are hungry. And when the females are nutritionally stressed, their pregnancies fail. Researchers estimate that two thirds of Southern Resident pregnancies in recent years have ended in miscarriage or neonatal death. Two thirds. In a population this small, that is catastrophic. Marina: And so when we see a mother carrying her dead calf, we are seeing — up close, and undeniably — the consequence of those numbers. Orcas are among the most socially complex animals on Earth. They live in matrilineal groups. A calf stays with its mother for life — both sons and daughters. These are not abstract creatures with abstract losses. This mother knows her calf. She has carried it inside her. She is carrying it still. Marina: The research on orca grief is careful — scientists are rightly cautious about anthropomorphizing. But what the behavior documents is this: orca mothers have been recorded repeatedly attempting to push dead calves to the surface, to keep them afloat, to stay with them for extended periods far beyond what you would see if this were simply a failure to recognize death. Whatever we want to call what the whales are experiencing — the behavior is real, and it is prolonged, and it is consistent across individuals and across populations. Orcas around the world have been documented doing this. It is not a quirk of one animal. Marina: The documentary from the Dolphin Research Center in the Florida Keys — which earned international recognition this week, according to Keys Weekly — tells a very different kind of story, a story of connection and joy and relationship between dolphins and the humans who study them. And I love that story too. But I think it matters, deeply, that we also hold this one. That we understand that what we are losing, when we lose these animals, is not just a species in a scientific catalog. It is a mother. It is a calf. It is a relationship as real as any we know. Marina: And here is where I land at the end of this episode. We live alongside creatures who sing to each other, who teach their children, who grieve their dead, who — we are now beginning to discover — may have something we can only call language. The ocean is not silent. It is full of voices. And the most important question of our time, I think, might be whether we are wise enough and humble enough to listen. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Thank you to each of them for supporting this work. Marina: If today's stories moved you — if you found yourself thinking differently about what's out there in the deep — please subscribe, leave a review, share this episode with someone you love. And check the link in show notes for everything we talked about today: the Project CETI work on sperm whale conversations, the A I gray whale cameras, the right whale research funding, and the Southern Resident orca situation. It's all there. Marina: Stay curious. Stay in wonder. The ocean has so much left to tell us — and Deep Voices will be here, listening right alongside you.