‘I Love You’ Song: Vishal Kapoor, Dolphin Dubey and Meenakshi Pange Honoured for Their Contributions - ANI News

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — the podcast that dives beneath the surface, into the songs, the stories, and the secret lives of whales and dolphins. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and ocean storyteller, and honestly? Every episode I make, I fall a little more in love with these animals all over again. Marina: A huge thank you to today's sponsors — Ada, who helps organizations bring A I into their workflows in smart, practical ways; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts working across everything from A I to SoC design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with an incredible portfolio spanning the silicon industry. These are the kinds of teams helping build the tools that are literally changing how we understand ocean life. So thank you, genuinely. Marina: On today's episode — we're going to listen in on one of the most extraordinary communication systems on Earth. We'll talk about the scientists using A I to decode the language of sperm whales. We'll track dolphins and right whales from above and below. And we'll look at where gray whale populations stand today — a story that's both hopeful and urgent. Let's dive in. Marina: So let's start with voices. Real voices. Because one of the things I want people to understand about cetaceans — whales and dolphins — is that they are not quiet. They are not passive. The ocean is alive with their sound, and what they're doing with that sound is, in many ways, still one of the great mysteries of science. Marina: Dolphins, for example, are incredibly vocal. They produce clicks, burst-pulse sounds, and whistles — and among those whistles, each individual dolphin develops what researchers call a signature whistle. It's essentially a name. A unique acoustic label that a dolphin coins for itself, usually in the first few months of life, and then carries with it for decades. Marina: And here's where it gets beautiful — dolphins use each other's signature whistles. If a dolphin wants to get the attention of a specific companion, it will mimic that companion's whistle. Not just any sound — the precise sound that belongs to that individual. Researchers have documented this in bottlenose dolphins, and it's one of the most compelling pieces of evidence we have that dolphins have a meaningful, referential form of communication. They're calling each other by name. Marina: What I love about this is the implication. To copy someone's name and use it to call for them — that requires you to hold a mental representation of another individual. It requires social memory, intentionality, and a kind of symbolic thinking. These are not small cognitive feats. Marina: And dolphins aren't alone in this. Sperm whales have their codas — rhythmic patterns of clicks, almost like Morse code — and different family groups, different clans, have different coda repertoires. Humpbacks have their haunting, elaborate songs. Orcas have dialects that are so distinct, researchers can identify which specific pod an animal belongs to just by listening to a recording. These aren't random noises. This is structured, learned, socially transmitted communication. And we are still, honestly, in the early days of understanding it. Marina: The point is — before we even get to the science of decoding it, we should just sit with the wonder of it. The ocean is full of voices. And they are saying something. Marina: Now, if voices are the "what," then culture and decoding is the "how do we figure it out?" — and this is where things get genuinely thrilling, because in the last few years, A I has entered the picture in a really serious way. Marina: Let me tell you about Project CETI. CETI stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative, and it is one of the most ambitious scientific projects I have ever come across. The goal — and I want you to really hear this — the goal is to decode the communication of sperm whales using A I. Not to make guesses. Not to speculate. To actually apply machine learning tools, the same kinds of tools that have revolutionized human language translation, and point them at one of the most complex animal communication systems on the planet. Marina: Sperm whales communicate primarily through clicks called codas. These are produced in social contexts — when whales are greeting each other, when families are reuniting, when they're traveling together at the surface. Researchers have been recording and cataloguing these codas for years, and we know they're structured. We know different clans use different repertoires. We know calves learn them. But we don't know what they mean. Marina: What Project CETI is doing is ambitious on multiple fronts. They're deploying underwater recording equipment near sperm whale communities in the Caribbean — specifically around the island of Dominica, where there's a well-studied, resident population of sperm whales. They're attaching biologging tags to individual whales to capture the acoustic environment from the whale's own perspective. And they're building datasets of thousands — potentially millions — of coda recordings, all labelled with behavioral context. Marina: Then they feed that into machine learning models. The logic is similar to how A I learned to understand human language — you give it enormous amounts of data, you let it find patterns, and eventually it starts to surface structure that human analysts alone might never have caught. The hope is that if the codas carry meaning — and there are strong reasons to believe they do — then A I might be able to reveal that structure. Marina: Now, I want to be careful here, because this is science, and science is honest about uncertainty. We are not at the point of having a whale translator. The researchers themselves are cautious about what they expect to find, and the timeline is long. But the project is real, it's rigorous, and it's being taken seriously by some of the world's leading linguists, cryptographers, marine biologists, and A I researchers. That combination alone tells you something. Marina: And it fits into a broader pattern of A I being used to understand cetaceans. Researchers are using machine learning to identify individual whales by their calls, to detect endangered species by their vocalizations in real time, to analyze years of archived recordings that no human team could ever get through manually. A I is not replacing marine biologists — it's giving us ears we never had before. Marina: What I find so moving about Project CETI is the underlying question it's asking. Not just "what are these sounds?" but "is there someone home?" Is there meaning? Is there a mind organizing these clicks into something like language? I think most of us who've spent time with these animals already suspect the answer. But wouldn't it be extraordinary to actually know? Marina: Alright — let's come up for air, because I want to talk about people. About the humans who are out there, right now, watching, tracking, protecting, and falling in love with these animals alongside us. Marina: First — I want to tell you about something that Florida International University is doing, because it's the kind of science that involves all of us. FIU has a citizen science initiative that invites everyday people — dolphin lovers, whale watchers, families on boat trips — to participate in real ocean research. The idea is that when you spot a dolphin or whale out on the water, you log it. You record what you saw, where, when, how many animals, what they were doing. And that data goes into a genuine scientific database that researchers use to track population movements, behavior, and habitat use. Marina: This is not a small thing. Marine researchers face a fundamental challenge — the ocean is vast, and there are never enough scientists to cover it. But there are millions of people on boats, on beaches, on ferries and kayaks and paddleboards, who see cetaceans all the time and have no way to make that sighting count. Citizen science changes that. Every observation becomes a data point. And over time, thousands of data points become a picture — a picture of where animals are, how populations are shifting, what waters they're using and when. Marina: And speaking of watching — let me tell you about the drones. The New England Aquarium has been pioneering the use of drone technology in right whale research, and it is changing what's possible in the field. North Atlantic right whales are one of the most critically endangered large whale species on Earth. There are fewer than 370 individuals left. Every single animal is known to researchers by name and by the unique pattern of white markings — called callosities — on their heads. Marina: Traditionally, studying these whales up close meant boats, and boats are stressful for the whales. They can disrupt behavior, interfere with feeding and nursing, and in some cases contribute to vessel strikes, which are one of the leading causes of right whale mortality. Drones change that equation. A drone can fly overhead, capture high-resolution photogrammetry — that's essentially aerial measurement — of a whale's body condition, assess whether females are pregnant or nursing, check for injuries or entanglements in fishing gear, all without the whale ever knowing a human is nearby. Marina: And the New England Aquarium's work has shown that drone surveys can detect things that would be nearly impossible to see from a boat — changes in body shape that indicate a whale is in poor condition, early signs of entanglement, the presence of a newborn calf tucked close to its mother. This is surveillance in the best possible sense. This is care from above. Marina: And while we're talking about population and care — I have to mention gray whales, because NOAA Fisheries has been tracking gray whale population abundance, and it tells a story with real complexity. The Eastern North Pacific gray whale population — the one that migrates along the West Coast of North America, from Arctic feeding grounds to Mexican breeding lagoons — has faced what researchers call an Unusual Mortality Event in recent years. Elevated strandings, animals coming ashore thin and sick. The numbers raised serious alarm. Marina: Gray whales were once hunted nearly to extinction. Then they made one of the most celebrated recoveries in conservation history — bouncing back to an estimated twenty-seven thousand animals at their peak. But the more recent declines remind us that recovery is not a destination. It's an ongoing relationship. Climate change is affecting the Arctic prey fields that gray whales depend on, and that ripples through the whole population. The science of monitoring their numbers — which NOAA does through careful aerial surveys and statistical modeling — is what allows us to see those changes in time to respond. Marina: What ties all of these stories together — the citizen science tracking, the drone surveys, the population counts — is attention. It's humans paying attention. And I think that's the most important conservation tool we have. Because you cannot protect what you do not see. And once you truly see these animals — once you understand that they sing, that they name each other, that they grieve, that they teach their young — it becomes very hard to look away. Marina: So here's what I keep coming back to, every time I make this podcast. The ocean is not silent. It is full of voices — clicking and whistling and singing across distances we can barely imagine. And those voices belong to minds. Minds with memories and families and cultures and possibly — possibly — something we might one day recognize as language. Marina: We are at this extraordinary moment in science where A I is giving us tools to listen more carefully than ever before. Where drones and citizen science are extending our eyes and ears across the whole ocean. Where researchers are sitting with recordings of sperm whale codas and asking, truly asking — what are you saying? I find that so hopeful. So worthy of our attention and our care. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams helping build the technology that makes science like this possible. Marina: If today's episode moved you — share it with someone. Subscribe so you don't miss what's coming next, because there is so much more to explore. And check the link in show notes for all the research, the projects, and the organizations we talked about today. The whales are out there, singing. Let's keep listening.