Cindy Friedman-van der Westhuizen | Whale song, AI and the cost of progress - News24

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I'm so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist who has spent way too many happy hours on boats, staring at the ocean, completely convinced that the animals living beneath the surface have things to say that we're only just beginning to understand. Marina: Today's episode is one of those ones that sat with me for days after I put it together. We've got a story about a mother whale who may have mourned her calf for days off the coast of Australia. We're going to talk about the loneliest whale in the world — a creature calling out into the deep for decades with no answer. And we're going to look at where science and A I are taking us in the quest to actually decode what cetaceans are communicating. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to the sponsors who make Deep Voices possible. Ada — a company helping clients integrate A I into their workflows in genuinely meaningful ways. Ago Consulting — that's pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consulting covering everything from A I to SoC. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. These are the kinds of forward-thinking teams that make ambitious science communication like this show possible, and I'm genuinely grateful for them. Marina: Alright. Let's go deep. Marina: So let's start with voices — real ones, documented ones, the kind that stop researchers cold when they hear them for the first time. Marina: The story I want to tell you here begins in 1989, somewhere in the vast, cold dark of the North Pacific. A researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution named William Watkins is listening to hydrophone recordings — underwater microphones — and he hears something strange. A whale call. But not like any whale call he'd catalogued before. Most baleen whales — your blue whales, your fin whales — they call at frequencies between about 10 and 40 hertz. Deep, rumbling, powerful sounds that travel thousands of kilometers through the ocean. This call was at 52 hertz. Higher. Lonelier sounding, somehow. Marina: Watkins and his team tracked this whale — or what they believed was a single individual — for years. Decade after decade of recordings, the same signature call, moving through the Pacific in patterns that didn't match any known species migration. Blue whale routes, fin whale routes — none of them. Just this one voice, doing its own thing, calling into the deep. Marina: The 52-hertz whale became famous. The internet found this story in the 2000s and the response was — honestly kind of overwhelming. People called it the loneliest whale in the world. They projected onto it. They wrote songs about it. And I get it — there's something achingly relatable about the idea of calling out and never being heard. Marina: But here's where the science gets interesting, and a little more hopeful than the loneliness narrative. Researchers have since pointed out that we don't actually know this whale can't be heard. We know it calls at an unusual frequency. We do not know whether other whales perceive that frequency and simply don't respond in the way we'd expect — or respond in ways our equipment hasn't captured. There's also been speculation that the 52-hertz whale could be a hybrid — perhaps a blue whale and a fin whale cross, which does happen — and that its unusual call reflects that unusual biology. There may even be more than one animal producing calls in this range. Marina: What I find most profound about the 52-hertz whale story isn't the loneliness. It's the reminder of how much we simply don't know. We have been listening to the ocean for decades with increasingly sophisticated equipment, and we still can't tell you with certainty what species this animal is, whether it is lonely, or whether the ocean is — in ways we haven't measured yet — answering back. Marina: The ocean keeps its secrets. But we are getting better at asking the right questions. Marina: Which brings me to the second thread — because the question of what cetaceans are actually saying has gone from poetic speculation to serious, funded, technologically ambitious science. And A I is right at the center of it. Marina: Let me paint you a picture of the challenge. Humpback whales produce some of the most complex vocalizations of any non-human animal on the planet. A single song can last for hours. The structure is intricate — there are units, which combine into phrases, phrases combine into themes, and themes combine into the full song. And the songs change. Every year, across an entire ocean basin, male humpbacks update their songs — new phrases ripple through populations, spreading from whale to whale like a hit track going viral. Researchers Roger Payne and Scott McVay described this back in 1971 and it genuinely changed how the scientific community thought about animal cognition. Marina: Now, for decades, studying whale song meant researchers sitting with spectrograms — visual representations of sound — and hand-annotating them. Listening, labeling, cataloguing. Incredibly painstaking work. Important work. But slow. Marina: Enter A I. And specifically, enter a project called Project CETI — that's the Cetacean Translation Initiative. A team of researchers, machine learning engineers, linguists, and marine biologists pooled together with one audacious goal: to use A I to decode sperm whale communication. Sperm whales communicate using clicks called codas — short, patterned sequences of clicks that researchers have long suspected carry social information. Different clans of sperm whales in different parts of the ocean have different coda repertoires. That looks, to a lot of researchers, like dialect. Like culture. Marina: Project CETI is deploying underwater listening arrays, biologging tags, even underwater drones — collecting an unprecedented volume of sperm whale vocalizations in the Eastern Caribbean. The plan is to feed that data into large-scale machine learning models — the same kind of transformer architecture that underlies large language models — and look for structure. Look for context. Look for the patterns that might tell us whether codas carry meaning, and if so, what kind. Marina: Now, a writer named Cindy Friedman-van der Westhuizen recently published a piece that asked a really important question alongside all of this excitement: what is the cost of this kind of progress? And she's right to ask it. Because the tools we use to listen — the ships, the equipment, the infrastructure — they have a footprint. Ocean noise pollution from shipping and sonar is a documented, serious threat to cetacean communication. There's something almost painfully ironic about the possibility that the civilization trying to decode whale language is also one of the things making it harder for whales to hear each other. Marina: This tension doesn't mean we stop the science. It means we hold both things at once — the wonder and the responsibility. The researchers in this space largely do. The best of them are asking not just "what are they saying" but "what do we owe them." Marina: And here's something else sobering that landed on my desk while I was putting this episode together. Researchers at Texas A&M have detected PFAS — per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, what people call forever chemicals — in dolphin milk. These are synthetic compounds that don't break down in the environment. They accumulate in living tissue. And now we're finding them in the milk that dolphin mothers are feeding to their calves. These are chemicals passed from mother to infant, at the very start of life. Marina: Dolphins, like humans, are long-lived, slow-reproducing mammals at the top of the food chain. Which means they bioaccumulate pollutants over a lifetime. A dolphin mother nursing her calf is, in a very real sense, carrying the chemical history of the ocean inside her. That finding should sit with us. It should change something about how we think about what we're putting into the water. Marina: And that brings me to the third thread. Because I want to talk about a mother. Marina: Off the Gold Coast of Australia, researchers observed something that is going to stay with me for a very long time. A humpback whale mother was seen staying beside a calf — a calf that appeared to be stillborn, or that had died very shortly after birth. And she stayed. For hours. Possibly for days. Marina: She maintained what researchers described as eye contact with the calf. She stayed close. She moved around it. She didn't leave. Marina: Now — and I want to be careful here, because this is science, not poetry, and the distinction matters — researchers are cautious about the word grief. We can't climb inside a whale's experience. We can't know with certainty what she was feeling. What we can say is that her behavior was consistent with what has been described in other species as mourning, or as the prolonged response to loss. We've seen this in elephants. We've seen it in chimpanzees. We've seen it in orcas — most famously in 2018 when an orca named Tahlequah carried her dead calf for 17 days and over 1,600 kilometers in what researchers called a tour of grief. Marina: The humpback observation adds to a growing body of evidence that cetaceans experience something — some internal state — in response to the death of a close companion or offspring that goes beyond a simple behavioral reflex. The fact that this mother maintained what looked like eye contact is particularly striking to me. Humpbacks have eyes on the sides of their heads. To look at something directly, they have to make an intentional postural adjustment. She was choosing to look at her calf. Marina: I think about what it took for her to carry a pregnancy in the ocean — the energy, the migration, the vulnerability. Humpbacks carry their calves for roughly eleven to twelve months. They are born into cold water, dependent entirely on their mother from the first breath. And when that calf didn't live — she stayed. Marina: Scientists who study animal cognition have been arguing for years that our tendency to deny complex emotional lives to non-human animals is not a neutral scientific position. It's a choice. And observations like this one keep asking us to revisit that choice. Marina: There is one more layer to this story that I can't leave out, because it connects directly to the forever chemicals thread. Humpback whales are a conservation success story in many ways — hunted nearly to extinction during the twentieth century whaling era, their populations have recovered significantly since the international commercial whaling moratorium of 1986. That recovery is real and it matters. Marina: But the threats didn't disappear with the harpoons. Ship strikes. Fishing gear entanglement. Noise pollution. Chemical contamination. Climate change shifting the distribution of krill, the tiny crustaceans that humpbacks depend on. The mother mourning her calf off the Gold Coast — we don't know why that calf didn't survive. We may never know. But we know the ocean that calf was born into is carrying burdens that weren't there a century ago. Marina: And yet — the mother stayed. Whatever it cost her, she stayed. Marina: I keep coming back to that. Marina: There's a strange and beautiful and sometimes heartbreaking thing about dedicating your life to understanding animals that can't tell you, in a language you grew up with, what they need or what they feel. You have to learn to pay attention in a different way. You have to learn to sit with uncertainty. You have to be willing to be moved. Marina: The 52-hertz whale is still out there — or its descendants are, or animals like it are, calling at a frequency that doesn't quite match anyone else. Project CETI is still in the water, recording, processing, looking for pattern and meaning in the click sequences of sperm whales. Somewhere in the Pacific, humpbacks are updating their songs right now, new phrases spreading across the ocean basin like a slow, beautiful current. Marina: And somewhere a mother is teaching her calf — or grieving one. The ocean is full of voices. We are just beginning to learn how to listen. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Three teams doing remarkable work in technology and innovation — I'm proud to have them with us. Marina: If this episode meant something to you, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and share it with someone who loves the ocean or needs a reason to. All the sources and links for today's stories are in the show notes — including the research on the Gold Coast humpback, Project CETI, and the Texas A&M forever chemicals study. Go read them. The scientists doing this work deserve your attention. Marina: Stay curious. Stay humble. And keep listening to the deep.