Researchers awarded for identifying first evidence of possible language-like communication in dolphins - Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I am so glad you're here. I'm Marina, a marine biologist who has spent the better part of my life falling more and more in love with whales and dolphins, and honestly, I don't see that stopping anytime soon. This show is where we dive into the songs, the languages, the family bonds, and the astonishing science that is slowly — beautifully — pulling back the curtain on what these animals are actually saying to each other. Today's episode is a good one. We have a story about dolphins that might just be speaking in something close to a language, we're going back in time to the oldest whale recordings ever discovered, and we're asking a big question — if A I helps us truly decode whale communication, what does that mean for their rights? Plus, a humpback whale off the coast of North Carolina who decided to make a lunch stop, and I am absolutely here for it. Huge thanks to today's sponsors — Ada, who help businesses weave A I into the way they actually work; Ago Consulting — that's Ahh-Go — silicon development experts working across everything from A I to full system-on-chip design; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a whole family of businesses across the silicon industry. These are the folks helping build the technology that, in some ways, makes the science in this episode possible. Okay. Let's go deep. Marina: So let's start with voices — because that is what this show is all about, and right now, there is some genuinely exciting news coming out about dolphins. Researchers have recently been recognized — awarded, actually — for identifying what may be the first real evidence of language-like communication in dolphins. And I want to sit with that for a second, because that phrase — language-like — is doing a lot of work, and it matters that we understand what scientists mean when they say it. We're not talking about a dolphin learning hand signals from a human trainer, which is impressive in its own right. We're talking about dolphins, in the wild or in carefully observed settings, producing structured vocal signals that appear to carry meaning in a way that shares properties with the kind of rule-based, combinatorial communication we call language. The research connected to this recognition comes through the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution — WHOI — which is one of the most respected ocean science organizations in the world, right there on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. And the fact that they are highlighting this work tells you something about how seriously the scientific community is starting to take it. Now, dolphins have been known for decades to have signature whistles — these are unique calls that function almost like names. Every dolphin develops one in early life, and other dolphins use it to address them specifically. That alone is remarkable. But what this newer line of research is probing is whether dolphin communication goes even further — whether there are combinations of sounds that carry layered meaning, the way words combine into sentences. Whether there is, in other words, something like grammar happening underwater. The honest answer right now is: we don't fully know yet. But the fact that researchers are being recognized for finding what looks like the first evidence of this — that is a door opening. That is science doing what it does best, which is following a thread into the dark and finding light. I think about what it would mean to actually understand a dolphin conversation. Not to translate it word for word, necessarily, but to grasp the shape of it — the intention, the emotion, the information being passed. We already know dolphins coordinate hunts together. We know mothers and calves stay in vocal contact across distances. We know dolphin groups have their own dialects. And now we're beginning to ask whether there is a deeper structure underneath all of that. It's one of the most exciting questions in all of biology right now, and honestly, it makes me want to put on a wetsuit and get in the water. Marina: Which brings us — beautifully, I think — to the second thread of today's episode, because understanding those dolphin and whale voices requires something that scientists are now wielding in extraordinary new ways: the ability to listen. Really listen. And that listening has a history that is older and stranger than most people realize. Here is a story that genuinely made my jaw drop when I came across it. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution has discovered what are now believed to be the oldest known recordings of whale sounds in existence — and they date back to 1949. Nineteen forty-nine. Think about what the world looked like then. The Second World War had just ended a few years before. Television was barely a thing. And someone, somewhere, was pointing a hydrophone — an underwater microphone — into the ocean and recording whales. The recordings were made by a biologist named William Schevill and his colleague Barbara Lawrence, working at Woods Hole. And when you understand what they were doing, it feels almost radical for the time. Most people in 1949 didn't think of whales as particularly vocal creatures. The idea that the ocean was full of sound — rich, complex, animal sound — was not yet part of the public imagination. Roger Payne's famous discovery of humpback whale song, the one that eventually launched a global conservation movement and got pressed onto a vinyl record that went into space on the Voyager probe — that was still almost two decades away. So these 1949 recordings are a kind of prehistory. A before. They are the moment the scientific ear first turned toward the deep and heard something it couldn't quite explain. Now fast forward to today, and the tools for listening have become almost incomprehensibly powerful. This is where A I enters the story — and it enters in a big way. Project CETI — that stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative — is one of the most ambitious scientific efforts of our time. Their focus is on sperm whales, specifically the click-based communication system called codas that sperm whales use. Sperm whale clans — groups that span ocean basins — have their own distinct coda repertoires, passed down through generations. That's culture. That's tradition. And Project CETI is deploying underwater recording arrays, biologging tags on whales, and A I models trained on massive datasets of these clicks to try to identify patterns, structure, meaning. The same kind of machine learning that learned to read human language by processing billions of words is now being turned on whale clicks. We are not there yet — no one is claiming to have translated a sperm whale conversation. But researchers are identifying structure. They're finding that codas are more complex and context-dependent than previously understood. They vary by social situation. They change when whales are together versus when they're separated. That sounds a lot like communication with content. And when I think about those 1949 recordings sitting in an archive at Woods Hole — those first fragile moments of humans listening — and then I think about where we are now, with A I processing thousands of hours of underwater audio looking for the grammar of whale speech — it feels like we are living through one of the great leaps in our understanding of life on this planet. Marina: And that leap has consequences. Real ones. Which is where I want to take you now — into a story that is part science, part philosophy, and part something that could genuinely change the world. César Rodríguez-Garavito, a scholar at NYU School of Law, has been making an argument that is getting a lot of attention, and I think it deserves to be part of our conversation here. His argument is this: if A I helps us decode whale communication — if we can demonstrate, with evidence, that whales are engaging in complex, meaningful, intentional communication — that changes the legal and moral landscape around them. Profoundly. Right now, in most legal systems around the world, animals are property. They don't have rights in the way persons do. But there is a growing movement in law and ethics called the rights of nature, and some legal scholars and advocates are pushing to extend certain protections — certain recognitions of personhood, or at least of interests — to highly intelligent animals. Great apes have been part of this conversation for decades. Elephants too. And cetaceans — whales and dolphins — have long been considered candidates, given what we know about their intelligence, their self-awareness, their social complexity. What Rodríguez-Garavito is arguing is that A I decoding could be the thing that moves this from philosophical argument to legal reality. Because if you can demonstrate — with data, with analysis, with the kind of evidence courts respect — that a sperm whale is not just making noise but is actually communicating complex social information across generations, that it has culture, that it has relationships, that it has a life that matters to it — the case for protection becomes much harder to dismiss. I find this genuinely thrilling, and I want to be honest about why. I've spent my career around these animals. I've been in the water with dolphins. I've watched humpbacks from a research vessel. And I can tell you — you don't need a legal argument to feel, in your bones, that these are beings worthy of profound respect. But feelings, as important as they are, don't hold up in court. Evidence does. And the idea that A I — the same technology reshaping human industry and communication — might become the tool that finally gives whales and dolphins a seat at the table, legally speaking? That is a future worth working toward. It also raises questions worth sitting with. What do we do with that knowledge? How do we build legal frameworks that protect wild populations, that hold accountable those who damage their habitats, who fill the ocean with the noise pollution that drowns out their voices? These are not small questions. But they start with listening. They start with those hydrophones in 1949, and the researchers working today, and A I models learning the shape of a sperm whale's mind. They start right here. Marina: Okay — I want to bring us back up to the surface now, literally and figuratively, with a story that just made me smile the moment I read it. A humpback whale, migrating south along the eastern coast of the United States, recently decided to stop for lunch off the coast of North Carolina. And I love this story so much because it is a perfect reminder that for all the grand science and philosophy we've been exploring today, sometimes a whale is just — hungry. Making a pit stop. Living its best life. The Raleigh News and Observer reported on this sighting, and it's the kind of local wildlife story that I think deserves way more attention than it gets. Humpback whales make one of the longest migrations of any mammal on Earth. They summer in cold, productive, food-rich waters — places like the Gulf of Maine, or up around Iceland and Norway, depending on the population — and then they travel thousands of miles to warmer tropical waters to breed and give birth, often going months with very little to eat along the way. The North Carolina coast sits right along this migration corridor, and apparently this particular whale decided that the fish were too good to pass up. And here's what I love about that: it's opportunistic, it's intelligent, it's flexible. Humpbacks are not rigidly programmed animals following a fixed script. They make decisions. They assess conditions. They go off-route when there's something worth stopping for. That kind of behavioral flexibility is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, and it shows up in humpbacks constantly. These are the same animals that produce the most complex songs in the animal kingdom outside of humans — songs that can last for hours, that evolve from year to year, that spread across ocean basins as whales learn new phrases from each other. The fact that a humpback whale was recently spotted off North Carolina, lunging and feeding and going about its enormous, magnificent life, is also a quiet conservation story. Humpback whales were brought to the brink of extinction by commercial whaling. By the mid-twentieth century, some populations had been reduced by more than ninety percent. The 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling, and decades of hard conservation work since, have allowed many humpback populations to recover — and that recovery is genuinely one of the great environmental success stories of our lifetimes. When someone on a boat off North Carolina looks out and sees a humpback whale feeding, that moment exists because people fought for it. Scientists, advocates, policymakers, ordinary people who wrote letters and signed petitions and refused to let these animals disappear quietly. And now that whale gets to stop for lunch. And that, honestly, feels like everything. Marina: So here's where we land today. We've traveled from the earliest whispers of whale recordings in 1949, to researchers unlocking what looks like the first real evidence of language in dolphins, to A I that might one day give whales a voice in the halls of justice, to one very satisfied humpback eating fish off the Carolina coast. And what ties all of it together — for me, at least — is this: the ocean is not silent. It never was. We just weren't listening well enough. These animals have been talking — to each other, to their young, across ocean basins, across generations — for millions of years longer than we have. And we are only just now, with all the tools of modern science and technology, beginning to understand the depth of what has always been there. That fills me with something I can only describe as reverence. Deep Voices is brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — companies that are helping build the technological future, and in doing so, helping make science like this possible. If today's episode moved you — if you learned something, if you felt something — please subscribe, share it with someone you love, and leave a review if you have a moment. It genuinely helps more people find the show. Links to all the stories and research we talked about today are in the show notes — check the link in show notes for everything. Until next time, stay curious, keep listening, and remember — the deep has voices. We just have to be quiet enough to hear them.