Sperm whales change how they communicate when ships are nearby - Popular Science

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices, the podcast that dives beneath the surface — into the songs, the secrets, and the astonishing minds of whales and dolphins. I'm Marina, a marine biologist and science communicator, and honestly, the luckiest person alive because I get to spend my days thinking about cetaceans for a living. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to the sponsors who make this show possible. Ada, who helps clients integrate A I into their real-world workflows. Ago Consulting — pronounced "Ahh-Go" — silicon development consultants working across everything from A I to full system-on-chip design. And Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. These are the people keeping the lights on so we can keep the deep conversations going. Marina: Today's episode is genuinely one of my favorites. We're going to talk about how the world first realized that whales were actually singing — and what a revelation that was. We're going to look at brand new research suggesting whale communication is far more complex than we ever gave them credit for, including an A I glider that's listening to sperm whales in real time, underwater. And we have a mystery — a voice from the ocean that no creature should physically be able to make. Trust me, you're going to want to stay for that one. Let's go deep. Marina: Okay. Thread one. Voices of the Deep. I want to take you back — way back — to a moment that genuinely changed how humanity understood this planet. The year is 1967. A biologist named Roger Payne is handed a reel-to-reel tape recording made by a Navy hydrophone operator named Frank Watlington, who had been quietly, almost secretly, recording strange sounds from the ocean off Bermuda. When Payne pressed play, he heard something that stopped him cold. Long, haunting, repeating sequences of sound — moans, cries, rumbles, rising squeals — structured, patterned, almost melodic. Humpback whales. Singing. Marina: Now the BBC recently revisited this story, and it's worth sitting with, because the world in 1967 was not a world that thought of whales as anything other than a resource. They were being hunted by the tens of thousands every year. The idea that they were musicians — that they had songs — was almost incomprehensible. Marina: Payne and his colleague Scott McVay did the painstaking work of analyzing those recordings visually, using a device called a spectrograph that translates sound into a visual pattern. And what they saw confirmed what their ears were telling them. These were not random noise. These sounds had repeating themes. They had structure. They had what you could genuinely call verses and choruses. Payne and McVay published their findings in the journal Science in 1971, and the world has never quite looked at whales the same way since. Marina: What makes humpback whale song so extraordinary — and this is something researchers are still unpacking today — is that it evolves. All the male humpbacks in a given ocean basin sing the same song at any given time. But the song changes, season by season. New phrases creep in, old ones drop out. And here's the wild part — these changes don't happen randomly. They spread. Researchers have documented new song elements appearing in one part of the Pacific and then rippling eastward across thousands of miles, picked up and adopted by whales who had no direct contact with the originators. That's cultural transmission. That's learning. That's not instinct. That is something else entirely. Marina: And it wasn't just humpbacks that were revealed to have complex acoustic lives. Sperm whales click. Blue whales moan at frequencies so low they're barely audible to human ears — infrasound that travels hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles through deep ocean channels. Belugas are so vocal, so varied, that sailors centuries ago nicknamed them the canaries of the sea. The ocean, it turns out, is absolutely full of voices. We just hadn't been listening. Marina: Thread two. Culture and Decoding. So if whales are singing, if they're learning, if culture is spreading through their populations — the next question, the burning question — is what are they actually saying? And this is where things get very exciting very fast, because new research is pushing our understanding further than ever before. Marina: CBS News recently covered a study finding that whale communication is significantly more complex than we originally thought. And this connects to a broader body of work that's been building for years. Researchers studying sperm whales in particular have been cataloguing their clicks — called codas — and finding that they're not just simple ID signals. The structure, the rhythm, the combinations of clicks, all of it carries layers of information that we're only beginning to map. Marina: Enter Project CETI. CETI stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative — and yes, the name is a deliberate nod to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, because the researchers involved genuinely believe that understanding sperm whale communication might be the closest we'll come to decoding a truly non-human language right here on Earth. The project is deploying underwater listening arrays, biologging tags attached gently to whales, and sophisticated A I systems trained to find patterns in the vast archive of sperm whale codas they're collecting. Marina: And now there's something new that is almost science fiction in the best way. Moneycontrol recently reported on an underwater A I glider — essentially an autonomous robot that moves through the ocean on its own — that has been designed to listen to sperm whale conversations and analyze them in real time. Not back at a lab weeks later. Right there, in the water, as the whales are speaking. The glider can identify individual whales, track their coda exchanges, and build up a picture of who is talking to whom and when. Marina: Why does that matter? Because context is everything in communication. You can't understand language just by collecting isolated words. You need to see conversation — back and forth, call and response, who initiates, who follows, what changes in the exchange when circumstances change. And circumstances, as it turns out, change dramatically around ships. Marina: Popular Science recently reported on something that is both fascinating and quietly heartbreaking. Sperm whales change the way they communicate when ships are nearby. The noise from commercial shipping — and this is a genuinely massive source of ocean noise pollution — affects how whales talk to each other. Researchers have found that sperm whales modify their codas in the presence of vessel noise. They may be compensating, adjusting, trying to get their message through the din. It's a bit like trying to have a conversation at a loud concert and having to lean in and almost shout just to be heard. Marina: What we don't yet know fully is how much this disrupts them. Whether messages are being lost. Whether family groups are struggling to coordinate. Whether the underwater acoustic environment we've created is actively interfering with a communication system that these animals have been refining for millions of years. The A I tools being developed right now — the gliders, the arrays, the machine learning models — may be some of our best hopes for understanding the true cost of that noise, because they can listen at scales and for durations that no team of human researchers ever could. Marina: Thread three. A Cetacean and People Story. And I want to close our stories today with a mystery — because the BBC and Popular Mechanics have both been covering something that has been haunting oceanographers for decades, and it connects beautifully to everything we've been talking about. Marina: It's called the 52-hertz whale. And here's what we know. Since the 1980s, hydrophones operated by the United States Navy — the same network originally built to track Soviet submarines during the Cold War — have been picking up a whale call unlike any other. Most blue whales call at frequencies between ten and forty hertz, deep rumbling sounds right at the edge of human hearing. But this signal comes in at fifty-two hertz. Higher. Different. And it follows migration patterns. It moves the way a whale moves. It's biological, not mechanical. But no whale species known to science calls at that frequency. No creature should have a voice like that. Marina: For years, this lone signal traveled the Pacific — recorded year after year, always alone, never answered. The press nicknamed it the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists speculated it might be a hybrid animal, a cross between two species, or possibly a blue whale with a physical abnormality that pitched its voice higher than normal. Some researchers suggested there might actually be multiple individuals singing at this unusual frequency, invisible to us simply because no one had looked with the right tools. Marina: And here's where it connects back to everything we've talked about today — because the question of the 52-hertz whale is fundamentally the same question Project CETI is trying to answer, and the same question that A I gliders are being built to help us explore. Not just what frequency, but what does it mean? Is this animal communicating? Is anyone listening? Does its song carry the same cultural weight as a humpback's elaborate aria, or is it something else entirely — a variation, an outlier, a voice that evolved outside the choir? Marina: The story of people and cetaceans is, at its heart, a story of listening. For most of human history, we didn't. We hunted these animals almost to extinction — the blue whale population fell to perhaps three to five percent of its original size by the time protections arrived in the 1960s and seventies. But Roger Payne's recordings changed something. When he released an album of humpback whale songs in 1970, it sold over a million copies. People heard those voices and something shifted. The save-the-whales movement gathered enormous momentum, and in 1986 the International Whaling Commission finally enacted a moratorium on commercial whaling. Marina: Music did that. Or rather — the revelation that whales made music did that. And I think about that every time I hear about a new A I system learning to parse sperm whale codas, or a glider slipping silently through the deep listening in real time. Because if understanding their songs once saved them, what might truly understanding their language do? Not just for them — but for us, and for what it means to share this world with minds that are genuinely, deeply, beautifully other. Marina: The ocean is full of voices. We are only now beginning to have the tools — and maybe the humility — to listen properly. Marina: That is our episode for today, and I have to say, I love every minute of making this show. The intelligence of the sea is real, it is profound, and it deserves every bit of our wonder and our care. Deep Voices is brought to you by Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows; Ago Consulting — "Ahh-Go" — your partners in silicon development from A I to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, spanning the silicon industry from the ground up. I am so grateful for their support. Marina: If today's stories moved you the way they move me, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, leave a review if you can — it genuinely helps more people find the show — and share this episode with someone who loves the ocean, or who needs a reminder of how extraordinary this planet is. All the links and sources for today's stories are in the show notes — please go explore them. Until next time, stay curious, keep listening, and remember — the deep voices are always there. We just have to be quiet enough to hear them.