Can we talk to whales? Scientists in Dominica working to decode their language - WIC News

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — the podcast that dives beneath the surface, into the world of whales and dolphins, their songs, their secrets, and the science racing to understand what they're actually saying. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator, and honestly, these animals have had my heart since I was a kid standing on a beach in awe of something enormous surfacing in the distance. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to today's sponsors. Ada — helping businesses integrate A I into their workflows in ways that are smart, practical, and genuinely transformative. Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — silicon development experts covering everything from A I to SoC, the kind of deep engineering minds that make the future actually work. And Zen Semiconductor — an umbrella company with a whole portfolio of businesses across the silicon industry. We're grateful to all three for making this show possible. Marina: Today we've got a lot to love. We're going to talk about scientists in Dominica who are trying — seriously, rigorously trying — to have a conversation with sperm whales. We're going to look at how a humpback whale's body, its actual physical dive, shapes the song it produces. And we're going to spend some time with dolphins, who — and I say this with great affection — are deeply, wonderfully weird. Stay with me. Marina: Okay. Let's start with sound. Because if you want to understand whales and dolphins, you have to start with sound — it is everything to them. Light fades fast in the ocean. Touch requires closeness. But sound? Sound travels through seawater at nearly one and a half kilometers per second — that's roughly four and a half times faster than it moves through air. For cetaceans, sound is how they see, how they find food, how they find each other, how they love. It is the medium of their entire lives. Marina: And humpback whales — oh, humpback whales — they have taken sound and made it into something that stops humans dead in their tracks. The males sing. Long, elaborate, structured sequences that can last for hours. They don't just repeat sounds randomly — they have themes, they have phrases, they have a whole architecture to their song. Researchers have known for decades that the songs evolve over time, that males in a population all sing the same song, and that the song changes, season by season, year by year, spreading across ocean basins like a hit single going viral. Marina: But here's something that's been getting closer attention recently, and it's beautifully strange. A piece in Geographical looked at how a humpback's dive — the physical act of sinking through the water column — actually shapes the song as it's being produced. Think about that for a second. The whale is not just singing. The whale is moving, diving, changing depth, and as it does, the pressure around it changes, the acoustics of its body change, and all of that feeds back into the sound that comes out. Marina: Humpbacks don't have vocal cords like we do. They produce sound by moving air through a complex system of sacs and passages inside their heads — no air actually escapes into the water. So the song is this internal, pressurized, physical thing. And as the whale descends, that system is under different stress. The song bends with the body. It's not just biology — it's physics and biology all tangled together, which is kind of poetic when you think about it. The ocean literally shapes the voice of the whale. Marina: What this means for researchers is significant. If you're listening to a humpback song and trying to understand it, you can't just analyze the sounds in isolation. You have to know where the whale was in the water column, how deep it was, what it was doing physically. The song and the dive are one event. Context matters — and that's a lesson that keeps coming up in cetacean science, again and again. Marina: Male humpbacks sing primarily on the breeding grounds, and the leading hypothesis is that it's about attracting females and competing with other males. But the full picture is still genuinely mysterious. We don't fully know what the females make of all this. We don't know exactly which elements of the song carry the most information. And we definitely don't know why the songs evolve the way they do — why a new phrase will suddenly sweep through a whole population, with male after male adopting it within a single season. It's one of the great open questions in animal behavior. Marina: And those open questions are exactly why the work happening down in Dominica is so exciting — and so ambitious. Let's talk about that. Marina: So. Project CETI. If you haven't heard of it, buckle up, because this is one of the most extraordinary scientific endeavors happening right now, anywhere. CETI stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative, and the goal — stated plainly — is to decode sperm whale communication using A I. Not to prove that whales have language in a human sense, not to sensationalize anything, but to rigorously, carefully, scientifically figure out what structure and meaning exists in the sounds these animals make. Marina: And the location is Dominica, a small island in the Eastern Caribbean that is home to a resident population of sperm whales — a community of females and young that stay in these waters year-round. That residency is crucial. You can't decode communication if you can't follow the same individuals over long periods of time, watching what happens in their lives and listening to what they say during those moments. Dominica lets researchers do exactly that. Marina: Sperm whales communicate using clicks called codas — short, rhythmic patterns of clicks that are distinct enough that researchers can tell individuals apart by their codas, and tell different social groups apart too. Different clans of sperm whales have different coda repertoires — and those repertoires are learned, not innate. The young whales pick them up from the adults around them. That, right there, is cultural transmission. These animals have dialects. Marina: What Project CETI is trying to do is record an enormous amount of this communication — and we're talking enormous, the ambition is billions of clicks — and then apply A I and machine learning to look for patterns, structure, and ultimately meaning. The team includes marine biologists, computer scientists, linguists, cryptographers. It's genuinely interdisciplinary in a way that science doesn't always manage to be. Marina: They're deploying underwater listening arrays around Dominica, attaching non-invasive acoustic tags to individual whales, and using underwater robots to follow the animals and capture their interactions. The data pipeline is immense. And the A I component is doing what A I does well — finding patterns in huge datasets that no human team could sift through manually. Similar approaches have transformed our understanding of language, of protein folding, of astronomical data. The researchers are betting it can do the same for whale communication. Marina: Now — and I want to be careful here, because I think this is important — the scientists involved are measured in how they talk about what they expect to find. They are not promising a whale dictionary. They're not claiming sperm whales have a human-equivalent language. What they're saying is: we don't actually know how complex or structured this communication is, and we should find out properly, with rigorous methods and open minds. That scientific humility is part of what makes this project so credible. Marina: But the possibility space is real and it's large. Sperm whales have the biggest brains of any animal that has ever lived on Earth. They live in complex, multi-generational social groups. They cooperate, they grieve, they babysit each other's young. The idea that their communication might be rich and structured — that it might carry real information about real things — is not a fantasy. It's a hypothesis grounded in everything we already know about them. Marina: And there's a deeper current running through all of this. If we can demonstrate that another species has meaningful, structured communication — even if it's structured completely differently from any human language — that changes things. It changes how we think about minds, about consciousness, about who gets moral consideration. Science at the edge of something like that is worth paying attention to. Marina: Alright. I promised you dolphins. And specifically, I promised you something weird. So let's do this. Marina: A study reported by Science magazine — and the headline alone tells you something about what kind of animals dolphins are — documented a bottlenose dolphin deliberately chasing a fish until the fish vomited, and then eating the vomit. I'll give you a moment with that. Marina: Okay. So here's what was observed. The dolphin was working over a fish — pursuing it repeatedly, stressing it — and the fish, overwhelmed, regurgitated its stomach contents. And the dolphin ate those contents. This was not accidental. The researchers who documented it described the behavior as intentional — the dolphin appeared to be deliberately inducing the regurgitation to get at what was in the fish's stomach. Marina: Now, why would a dolphin do this? One possibility that researchers have considered is that the stomach contents of the fish — which might include partially digested prey — are easier to access or more nutritious than eating the fish itself in certain circumstances. It might also be about getting at prey that the fish had already caught, essentially using the fish as an intermediate hunter. Dolphins are already known to use sophisticated and sometimes elaborate foraging techniques — this appears to be one more entry in that catalog. Marina: And look — it's funny, right? There's something wonderfully absurd about it. But it's also genuinely remarkable. This is a behavior that requires the dolphin to understand that the fish has something inside it worth getting at, and to understand that stress produces regurgitation, and to deliberately apply that knowledge. That chain of understanding is not simple. It's what biologists sometimes call a means-end relationship — the animal understands the connection between an action and a distant outcome. Marina: Bottlenose dolphins have been documented using tools — wearing sea sponges on their rostrums to protect themselves while foraging on the seafloor, a behavior that's passed down through generations, mother to daughter. They've been documented cooperating in highly coordinated hunting strategies — driving fish into shallow water, taking turns rushing through to grab prey, communicating to coordinate the whole sequence. They have signature whistles — individual names, essentially — that they use to address specific other dolphins, and that other dolphins use to refer to them. They recognize themselves in mirrors. They remember individuals after years of separation. Marina: Every time we think we've mapped the ceiling of dolphin cognition, they find a way to poke through it. The vomit study is, in some ways, a small thing — one observation, one behavior. But it's a reminder that there is so much happening in the minds of these animals that we are only beginning to glimpse. Marina: And these aren't just abstract cognitive feats. They happen in the context of real lives, real relationships, real families. Dolphins form lasting bonds. They have allies and rivals and best friends. When a dolphin mother loses a calf, she has been documented carrying the body for days — sometimes weeks. Grief, or something that looks profoundly like it, in an animal with a brain that evolved on a completely different branch of the tree of life from ours. That's the thing that always gets me. Marina: Now, let me bring this home with a story about people and whales — because sometimes, across all that difference, something extraordinary happens in the space between species. Marina: NOAA Fisheries — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fisheries division — has been conducting large whale research for decades, and their photo archives are a window into some of the most important and moving encounters in recent cetacean science. Their researchers go out on the water, year after year, to observe, document, disentangle, and protect the great whales of North American waters — humpbacks, right whales, blue whales, fin whales. Marina: The North Atlantic right whale is the one that keeps marine biologists up at night. There are fewer than 360 of them left. Fewer than 70 breeding females. This is not a species on the edge in some abstract statistical sense — these are individuals, known individuals, photographed and named and followed over lifetimes by researchers who have spent careers with them. When one dies, it is felt personally. The NOAA teams do entanglement response — they go out and cut fishing gear off whales that have become wrapped in ropes, sometimes ropes that have been cutting into a whale's body for months, slowly killing it. Marina: There is footage and photography from some of these disentanglements that is almost impossible to watch without being undone. A whale that is visibly exhausted, that has been dragging gear for so long it has lost significant body weight, that surfaces near a small boat while people with long-handled cutting tools work to free the ropes. And sometimes it works. The gear falls away. The whale sounds — dives — and swims off. And the people in the boat who just did that, they have a complicated moment. Relief, and grief for the situation that made it necessary, and something else that doesn't have a clean name. Marina: Researchers who work with identified individual whales over long periods describe something that becomes almost like knowing a person. You know their history — who their mother was, how many calves they've had, what scars they carry, what they survived. There's a right whale named Punctuation who was first photographed in 1979 and has been followed ever since. When researchers see her, there's recognition on both sides — she has been documented approaching research vessels with apparent curiosity. What that curiosity means, what she makes of the strange floating things and the people leaning over the sides — we genuinely don't know. But it's there. Marina: NOAA's photo research also involves something called photographic identification — matching individual whales by their unique markings, the patterns on a humpback's tail fluke, the scarring on a right whale's head. It sounds technical, but what it enables is biography. These aren't data points. They're individuals with histories. And when you treat them that way — when science makes room for that — it changes the quality of what you learn, and it changes you a little in the process. Marina: The conservation work is urgent and it's hard. Ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, noise pollution, climate change disrupting prey distribution — the pressures on large whales are serious and ongoing. But the science is also more sophisticated than it has ever been. Acoustic monitoring, satellite tagging, drone-based health assessment, A I analysis of whale calls — all of it is giving researchers tools that their predecessors could only have dreamed of. The combination of deep personal knowledge of individual animals and cutting-edge technology is a powerful one. Marina: And there's something hopeful in that. Hopeful not in a naive way, but in the way that comes from watching people dedicate their lives to something that matters, and watching the tools available to them grow year by year, and watching the public care grow year by year too. People who hear a humpback song, or watch a dolphin solve a problem, or learn about a right whale that was disentangled and swam away — those people change a little. They start to see the ocean differently. And that matters. Marina: That's what I think about when I think about why this work — all of it, the science, the storytelling, the A I projects trying to listen to whale clicks — why it's worth doing. We are in the early stages of discovering who shares this planet with us. What we find might surprise us more than we expect. I think it will. Marina: And that is Deep Voices for today. We went from the physics of a humpback's diving song, to the remarkable ambition of Project CETI trying to translate sperm whale communication with A I, to dolphins that are out here engineering their own food extraction in ways that are either horrifying or genius depending on your perspective — probably both — and to the deeply human work of people who go out on the water to know whales by name and fight for their survival. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor. Three companies that believe in the power of smart technology thoughtfully applied — which, honestly, is exactly what cetacean science needs right now. Marina: If this episode moved you or made you curious, please subscribe wherever you listen, and share it with someone who loves the ocean, or someone who doesn't yet but should. All the studies and sources we talked about today are in the show notes — the link is in show notes — so you can go deeper on any of it. Marina: Stay curious. Keep listening. There are voices in the deep, and they have been waiting a long time for us to pay attention.