MBARI immerses visitors in the ocean soundscape at 16th Annual Whalefest Monterey - MBARI

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — the podcast that listens to the ocean and tries to hear what it's saying back. I'm Marina, a marine biologist who has spent more years than I can count falling deeper and deeper in love with whales and dolphins, and I am so glad you're here with me today. Marina: Before we dive in, a huge thank you to our sponsors — Ada, who helps businesses integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually make sense; Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — your go-to for silicon development consulting, from A I all the way to SoC; and Zen Semiconductor, an umbrella company with a remarkable portfolio spanning the silicon industry. These are the folks who keep Deep Voices going, and we're grateful. Marina: Today on the show — we're going to step inside a festival where the whole ocean seemed to show up in one room, we're going to talk about one of the strangest whale behaviors scientists have puzzled over for years and the explanation that finally cracked it open, and we're going to meet the drone that might just change how we look after dolphins forever. Plus — a little detour to Cape Cod, one of the most magical whale-watching spots on the planet. Let's go. Marina: Alright, thread one. Voices of the Deep. Marina: Imagine you're standing in a room and suddenly — the ocean is all around you. Not a picture of the ocean, not a video clip — the sound of it. The actual, living, breathing acoustic world beneath the surface. Clicks and pulses and long, aching moans that travel for hundreds of miles through cold dark water. Marina: That's exactly what MBARI — the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute — created for visitors at the 16th Annual Whalefest Monterey. They built an immersive ocean soundscape experience. And I love this so much, because most of us will never free-dive into the deep ocean and just listen. But the ocean is incredibly loud — in the most beautiful way. Marina: Here's the thing about underwater sound that blows my mind every single time I think about it. Sound travels about four and a half times faster in water than it does in air. So when a blue whale produces a low-frequency call — and blue whales produce some of the lowest, loudest sounds of any animal on Earth — that sound can travel not just miles, but potentially hundreds, even thousands of miles through a phenomenon called the SOFAR channel. That stands for Sound Fixing and Ranging. It's essentially a layer of the ocean at a certain depth where temperature and pressure create a kind of acoustic superhighway. Marina: Scientists have recorded blue whale calls that clock in at around 180 decibels at the source. To put that in perspective, a jet engine at close range is about 140 decibels. These animals are literally broadcasting across ocean basins. And we're only beginning to understand what they're saying to each other across all that distance. Marina: What MBARI does — and what events like Whalefest celebrate — is bring that invisible world into human experience. Because one of the biggest barriers to people caring about the ocean is that they simply can't hear it. It's hidden. It's underwater. But when you pipe those sounds into a room — those whale songs, those dolphin click-trains, that deep oceanic rumble — something shifts in people. I've watched it happen. Their shoulders drop. Their eyes go wide. And suddenly the ocean isn't abstract anymore. It's alive and it's talking, and we're finally paying attention. Marina: Monterey Bay itself is one of the richest marine mammal habitats in the world. It sits at the edge of a deep submarine canyon, which acts like a magnet for marine life. Humpbacks, blue whales, orcas, gray whales on migration — they all pass through. So when MBARI fills a room with ocean sound, they're not creating something imaginary. They're just pulling back a curtain. Marina: And honestly? If you ever get the chance to go to Whalefest Monterey — go. Put it on the list. The link is in show notes. Marina: Okay, thread two. Culture and Decoding. Marina: So. Weird whale behavior. National Geographic recently published a piece with the irresistible headline — and I'm paraphrasing here — "Scientists finally have an explanation for this weird whale behavior." And the behavior they're talking about is lobtailing. Marina: Lobtailing is when a whale lifts its massive tail fluke — that tail can be fifteen, eighteen feet across on a humpback — and just slams it onto the surface of the water. Over and over. Sometimes dozens of times in a row. It makes a sound like a cannon going off. Researchers have watched this for decades and scratched their heads. Is it communication? Is it feeding? Frustration? Play? Marina: And here's what makes cetacean behavior so wonderfully maddening to study — whales don't come with instruction manuals. You're watching from a boat, from a drone, from an underwater hydrophone array, and you're piecing together context clues like a detective who doesn't speak the language of the crime scene. Marina: But science is patient. And over years of careful observation, researchers have gathered enough data to start seeing patterns. The emerging explanation for lobtailing — particularly in humpbacks — is that it's communicative. It appears to function as a long-distance signal. The slap of that tail on the water creates a sound that carries. Other whales respond to it. It may be a way of saying — hey, I'm here. Or — something is happening over here. Or possibly — back off. Marina: What's so exciting about this is that it adds another layer to what we understand about whale communication. Because these animals aren't just using their voices. They're using their bodies. Their tails. Their fins. Breaching — when a whale launches its entire body out of the water — may also be communicative. The louder the sea state, the more whales breach. As if they're switching channels from acoustic to percussive when the background noise gets too high. Marina: And this is where A I is starting to play a genuinely thrilling role. Projects like Project CETI — that's the Cetacean Translation Initiative — are using machine learning to analyze thousands of hours of sperm whale vocalizations called codas. These are rhythmic patterns of clicks, and sperm whales use them in social groups. Different clans have different coda repertoires — passed down through generations. That is culture. That is non-human culture, documented and real. Marina: What A I brings to this is pattern recognition at a scale no human team could manage alone. Feeding enormous libraries of recordings through neural networks, looking for structure, for syntax, for the kind of layered complexity that might — and I want to be careful here, because we're not there yet — but might hint at something like meaning. Not human language. Something that belongs entirely to whales. And that possibility is one of the most profound things I can imagine. Marina: The PHASM project — led by Stephen F. Austin State University — is doing something adjacent and equally exciting. PHASM stands for Photogrammetric Health Assessment of Small cetaceans using Multi-rotor drones. Which is a mouthful, but what it means in practice is this: researchers are using drones to monitor the health of wild dolphin populations in a way that's non-invasive and incredibly precise. Marina: Traditionally, assessing whether a wild dolphin is healthy — whether it's the right weight, whether it's pregnant, whether it's injured — required getting very close to the animal, or in some cases capture-and-release health assessments. Stressful for everyone involved, frankly. But a drone hovering quietly overhead can photograph a dolphin from above and — using photogrammetry, which is the science of making measurements from photographs — calculate its body condition with remarkable accuracy. Marina: SFA's team is at the leading edge of developing and refining this technology, and what strikes me is that it's exactly the kind of convergence that defines modern cetacean science. Biology meets engineering meets A I image analysis. And the dolphins, ideally, barely notice the drone is there. Marina: Culture, communication, technology — it's all woven together now. And every thread leads back to the same question: what is it like to be a whale? Marina: Thread three. A Cetacean and People Story. Marina: Let's go to Cape Cod. Marina: If you've never stood on the outer edge of Cape Cod — that long curving arm of land that hooks out into the Atlantic off Massachusetts — and watched for spouts, I'm here to tell you it is one of the great experiences available to a human being on this Earth. The Cape Cod Times recently noted that a particular spot off Cape Cod ranks among the best whale-watching locations in the entire world. And I believe it. Marina: Stellwagen Bank. That's the name of the place. It's a shallow underwater plateau — a bank — just north of Provincetown, at the tip of the Cape. It sits at the southern end of the Gulf of Maine, and it is extraordinarily productive. Cold, nutrient-rich water wells up around it, feeding blooms of phytoplankton, which feed krill and small fish, which feed — well. Humpback whales. And fin whales. And right whales. And minke whales. And harbor porpoises. And white-sided dolphins. Marina: Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary was designated in 1992, and it represents one of the genuine conservation wins of the modern era. Because whale watching in this area doesn't just create wonder — it creates advocates. People who have looked a humpback whale in the eye from thirty feet away on a boat don't go home indifferent. They go home changed. Marina: There's a humpback whale named Salt who has been documented in these waters since 1976. She has a distinctive white patch on her dorsal fin — hence the name — and she is one of the most studied individual whales in the world. Salt has had over a dozen calves. Her daughters have had calves. Researchers have now documented four generations of Salt's family in Stellwagen Bank. Four generations of a whale family, known by name, followed with love. Marina: And that longitudinal knowledge — that multigenerational record — is irreplaceable. It tells us things about humpback society that we couldn't learn any other way. That mothers and calves maintain bonds even after weaning. That some behaviors appear to be passed from mother to calf — a particular feeding technique, a preference for certain areas of the bank. Marina: One of those feeding techniques is called bubble net feeding — and it is one of the most astonishing things any animal does anywhere. A group of humpbacks will coordinate underwater. One or more whales spiral upward, releasing air from their blowholes to create a cylinder of rising bubbles. The bubbles corral fish into a tightly packed ball. And then the whales lunge upward through the center, mouths open, engulfing thousands of fish in a single strike. Marina: This behavior has to be learned. Calves watch their mothers. They practice. And researchers have actually documented the spread of a new variant of bubble net feeding — called lobtail feeding, where the whale slaps its tail before diving to begin the spiral — spreading through the Stellwagen population over years, like a cultural innovation moving through a community. Marina: Which brings us right back to lobtailing. And to culture. And to the way everything in the world of whales is connected. Marina: The people story here is this: for a long time, the waters off Cape Cod were whaling waters. Ships went out from New Bedford and Nantucket and Provincetown and came back with oil and bone. The humpbacks of Stellwagen Bank were hunted nearly to oblivion. And then something shifted. Laws changed. Attitudes changed. And now, from those same harbors, boats go out — and people stand at the rails and cry when a whale breaches. That is a turnaround worth celebrating. Not finished — there are still enormous threats to these animals — but real. Marina: Salt has been swimming those waters for nearly fifty years. She has outlasted the industry that almost killed her kind. And every summer she comes back, and researchers are there to meet her, notebooks and cameras in hand, and say — we see you. We know you. We're glad you're here. Marina: That, to me, is everything. Marina: And so we come up for air. Marina: What I keep coming back to, episode after episode, is this: we share this planet with beings that sing across ocean basins, that teach their children specialized skills, that grieve their dead and recognize themselves in mirrors, that have names for each other — or something very much like names. And we are only just beginning, with all our hydrophones and drones and A I and patient decades of watching, to glimpse what their lives actually contain. Marina: That's not a small thing. That's one of the most important frontiers in science. And it belongs to all of us. Marina: Deep Voices, brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — three teams of genuinely brilliant people helping build the tools and thinking that make science like this possible. Marina: If this episode moved you — share it. With someone who loves the ocean, with a kid who's never seen a whale, with a friend who doesn't know yet that sperm whales have dialects. Subscribe wherever you listen, and check the show notes for links to everything we talked about today — Whalefest Monterey, the PHASM project, Stellwagen Bank, Project CETI. Marina: Stay curious. Stay listening. The ocean has so much left to say.