UC Berkeley and Project CETI study shows sperm whales communicate in ways similar to humans - University of California

Marina: Welcome to Deep Voices — I'm Marina, marine biologist, ocean obsessive, and your guide into the hidden world of whales and dolphins. Every episode we dive into their songs, their cultures, their family bonds, and the astonishing science trying to decode what they're actually saying to each other. Marina: Today's episode is a big one. We've got sperm whales communicating in ways that are eerily similar to us humans, humpback whales doing something so strange that scientists genuinely don't have an explanation yet, and a story about an orca mother that is going to stay with you. Marina: Before we dive in, a warm thank you to the sponsors who make this show possible. Ada — helping businesses integrate A I into their workflows in ways that actually work. Ago Consulting — that's "Ahh-Go" — 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 people building the tools and technology that make science like what we're about to discuss possible. So thank you to all of them. Marina: Alright. Let's go deep. Marina: So — Voices of the Deep. I want to start here because this story lit up my brain when I read it, and I think it's going to do the same for you. Marina: Sperm whales. Picture one for a moment — that enormous, block-shaped head, the wrinkled skin the color of a stormy sea, diving down into the darkness to depths where light simply doesn't exist. They are the largest toothed animals on the planet. And for a long time, scientists knew they made sounds — these sharp, rhythmic clicking patterns called codas — but the full complexity of what those clicks were doing? That was murky. Marina: Well, researchers from UC Berkeley working with Project CETI — that stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative — have been changing that picture in a really profound way. And their latest work suggests that sperm whale communication shares structural features with human language in ways that are genuinely surprising. Marina: Here's what I mean. Human language isn't just a list of sounds. It has this property called combinatorial structure — where you take a small set of basic units, combine them in different arrangements, and suddenly you can express an enormous range of meaning. Think about how the same letters can be rearranged into completely different words. Or how the same words, in different orders, mean different things. Marina: What the researchers found in sperm whale codas is that their clicks aren't just fixed, repeating signals. They have layers. There's something like a basic rhythmic unit, and then variations — changes in tempo, changes in ornamentation, changes in the rubato, which is this beautiful musical term for the slight stretching or compressing of timing. And when you combine all those variables, the potential combinations explode into something that looks less like a simple signal system and more like something with genuine expressive range. Marina: Project CETI has been deploying underwater recording equipment and A I-driven analysis tools around a sperm whale community in the eastern Caribbean, near the island of Dominica. These are real, identified individual whales — whales that researchers have been watching for years. And the A I is helping scientists do something that would have been impossible by hand: cataloguing and comparing thousands upon thousands of coda sequences to find the patterns buried inside them. Marina: Now — and I want to be careful here, because good science demands this — the researchers are not claiming they've translated sperm whale language. They're not saying they know what any specific coda means. What they're saying is that the architecture of the system has more in common with human language structure than we previously understood. That is a different, more precise, and in some ways more exciting claim. Because it means the ingredients for complex communication are there. And that raises a question we're only beginning to know how to ask: what are they doing with it? Marina: Sperm whales live in tight family groups — matrilineal clans, where daughters stay close to their mothers and grandmothers for life. The males wander, but the females and young stay together. They hunt together, they babysit each other's calves, they make collective decisions. That's a lot of social coordination happening in the dark, in the deep ocean, across distances that would make your voice disappear. Of course they need a rich communication system. Of course they do. Marina: And every time science peels back another layer of that system, I find myself thinking — we've been sharing this planet with minds like this for millions of years, and we're only now, right now, beginning to really listen. Marina: Okay. Thread two. Culture and decoding. And I want to stay in this world of A I and animal communication for a moment, but I also want to zoom out and talk about something that is happening right now in the field that feels genuinely historic. Marina: The effort to understand cetacean communication has accelerated in the last few years in a way that would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago. And a lot of that is because of tools — A I tools — that can process acoustic data at a scale no human team ever could. Marina: Project CETI is one example, and we just talked about sperm whales. But the broader principle applies across species. Humpback whales. Bottlenose dolphins. Orcas. Each of these animals has communication that is complex, that is learned — not just instinctive — and that varies between populations in ways that look remarkably like dialects or even cultures. Marina: And speaking of humpbacks — here's where today's story gets wonderfully weird. Scientists have been observing humpback whales doing something they've called gaping behavior. Which is exactly what it sounds like: humpbacks opening their mouths wide, sometimes holding that position, in contexts that don't seem to involve feeding. And researchers are genuinely puzzled by it. Marina: Now, humpbacks are already famous for being among the most behaviorally inventive large whales we know. They're the ones with the songs — those haunting, hours-long sequences that the males produce during breeding season, songs that evolve over time, spread across ocean basins, change year to year in ways that look like cultural transmission. One whale picks up a new phrase, others start copying it, and within a few seasons the whole population has shifted. That is culture. That is learning. That is not instinct. Marina: But the gaping — scientists are still working it out. Some researchers have speculated it could be a form of visual communication or signaling, since humpbacks do interact in complex ways at the surface. Others have wondered if it relates to some kind of sensory process. The honest answer right now is: we don't fully know. And I love that. I love that these animals are still surprising us. I love that a fifty-foot, forty-ton whale can do something in front of trained researchers and leave them going — huh. What was that? Marina: It's a good reminder that for all the progress A I is enabling — and the progress is real and remarkable — the ocean is not a solved problem. These animals have been doing things we haven't described yet. We are still in the early chapters of understanding them. Marina: What A I is doing, in the hands of teams like Project CETI and others, is compressing the timeline. Analysis that would have taken a graduate student a decade of listening is now possible in months. Pattern recognition across data sets too large for any human to hold in their head is becoming routine. And that means the questions we can ask are getting sharper, and the answers are getting closer. Marina: There's something poetic, I think, about using the most sophisticated intelligence we've built to try to understand intelligences that evolved completely separately from us. These animals didn't take the same evolutionary path. They went back to the sea. They lost their hands. They developed bodies shaped by water, by pressure, by darkness and sound. And yet here we are, trying to build a bridge. Using our tools, our curiosity, our patience. Listening. Marina: Okay. I need a moment here before the third thread, because this next story is heavy. It's true. And it matters. Marina: A killer whale mother was spotted off Vancouver Island, carrying her dead calf. Marina: If you've been listening to this show for a while, you might remember that this has happened before. In 2018, an orca named Tahlequah — a member of the critically endangered Southern Resident killer whale population — carried her dead calf for seventeen days and over a thousand miles. The world watched. Scientists, journalists, people who had never thought much about whales before — they watched, and they were moved in a way that was hard to articulate. Marina: And now it's happened again. Another mother. Another calf. Another grief. Marina: I want to be careful about how I talk about this, because grief is a weighted word, and science rightly asks us to be precise about what we're claiming about animal minds. But here's what I can say: the behavior is documented. It's real. These mothers carry their dead young for days, sometimes longer. They don't let go easily. And researchers who study these animals, who know them as individuals, who have watched them for years — they describe watching this as one of the most emotionally affecting things they've ever witnessed in the field. Marina: The Southern Resident killer whales are a population in crisis. There are fewer than eighty of them left. They live in the waters of the Pacific Northwest — the Salish Sea, the coast of Vancouver Island — and they are struggling. The Chinook salmon they depend on for food have declined. Boat traffic and noise disrupt their ability to hunt and communicate. Pollution accumulates in their bodies. When calves are born, they are born into a world that has been made harder for them. Many don't survive. Marina: And what's so striking about this moment — about a mother carrying a calf she can't save — is that it forces a reckoning. Because this isn't abstract. This is a specific animal, in a specific family, in a specific population that we have named and documented and watched for decades. We know who she is. We know her history. And we know that the reasons her calf didn't survive are tangled up with choices that humans made — about fish, about shipping lanes, about what we put into the water. Marina: Orcas are the most widely distributed marine mammals on earth after humans. They live in every ocean. They have distinct cultures — populations that don't interbreed, that have their own dialects, their own hunting techniques, their own social structures, passed down through generations. The Southern Residents are one of the most studied, most beloved, and most endangered of those cultures. Marina: I think about what it would mean to lose them. Not just as a conservation statistic — but as a culture. A language. A way of being in the world that evolved over thousands of years and that we have never fully understood. Gone. Marina: And I think about this mother, holding on. And I think — we should hold on too. To the urgency of this. To the responsibility of it. Marina: Before I wrap up today, I have to mention something that arrived in my reading this week that is a little different in tone — and honestly, kind of delightful. There's a piece in The Cut about Olivia Newton-John's "Dolphin Song" — a track she recorded in the 1970s, gentle and dreamy, full of wonder about dolphins and connection and the sea. And the writer talks about how much they think about it. How it lodged in their head and stayed. Marina: And reading it, I felt that. Because I think a lot of us have a version of that — a song, a book, a moment when we were young where the ocean and the animals in it suddenly felt real and close and full of something we didn't have a word for. For some people it was watching a documentary. For some it was a whale watch where a humpback surfaced close enough that you felt the mist. For some it was a song by Olivia Newton-John. Marina: These moments of connection matter. They're part of how care gets built. How curiosity becomes commitment. The science is essential — the A I analysis, the acoustic tags, the long-term field studies. All of it is essential. But so is wonder. So is a song that makes you feel like the dolphins are singing back. Marina: We are better scientists and better advocates when we let ourselves be moved. So let yourself be moved. Marina: And that brings us to the end of today's episode of Deep Voices. Marina: What strikes me, sitting with all of these stories together, is that we are living in a genuinely remarkable moment. The tools exist now to listen to the ocean in ways we never could before. The A I, the hydrophones, the long-term data sets — they're all converging. And the animals are there, waiting, doing things that astonish us. Grieving. Singing. Gaping inexplicably in ways that leave scientists scratching their heads. Clicking out complex patterns in the dark. Marina: They've been here longer than we have. They have something to say. I believe that. And I think the most important thing we can do — as scientists, as listeners, as people who share this planet — is keep showing up. Keep listening. Marina: Deep Voices is brought to you by Ada, Ago Consulting, and Zen Semiconductor — thank you to all of them for making this show possible. Marina: If today's stories moved you — share the episode with someone who needs to hear it. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a dive. And check the link in show notes for sources, more on Project CETI, and everything we talked about today. Marina: I'm Marina. Stay curious. Stay kind to the sea. And I'll see you in the deep.