For centuries, human beings have looked around at the creatures with whom we share this marvelous Earth and wondered if they can communicate like we do. Communication, after all, is one of the linchpins of the human project. None of what we’ve achieved as a species would be possible without it.
We’ve thus deployed significant resources to study how far along non-human animals have gotten in their own projects. This line of enquiry has served a few key purposes.
Why We Study Animal Communication
A lot of the research in the area of animal communication has been driven by the goal of better understanding human communication. The underlying assumption here is that animal cognition, and therefore communication, might in some way be a more rudimentary form of human cognition. And therefore, studying how animals get messages across to each other might lead us to the building blocks that constitute our significantly more advanced symbolic systems.
Looking at shared communication patterns is also a way to get to the bottom of questions regarding shared ancestry. Let’s say that we begin to see that gestures are a feature of the communication between all non-human great apes. This would serve as another piece of evidence that gesture-based communication is a homologous trait, meaning that the last common ancestors that we share with great apes like gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos also communicated using gestures.
Finally, studying animal communication also serves a more pragmatic purpose for human beings. Most of us have to coexist with animals in some way, whether that’s companion animals like dogs and cats or, in some cases, wild animals like monkeys and elephants. Studying how these animals communicate gives us the ability to have healthier relationships with them and an insight into their inner lives and suffering.
Given those goals, human beings have systematically studied the interactions between many different kinds of animals. Perhaps one of the most fascinating classes of animals in that regard are whales. The other-worldly emanations that we’ve heard come out of these incredible creatures have always piqued our curiosity. New research now sheds light on how whales use these sounds to communicate with each other.
The Whale Communication System
A study that came out in the journal Nature Communications earlier this year attempts to figure out the underlying patterns in vocalisations produced by sperm whales. The study was undertaken by a team consisting of scientists from MIT’s AI Laboratory and the Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI).
Sperm whales don’t communicate in the spectral songs that we usually associate with whales; those actually originate from a different kind of whale, the humpback. Sperm whales, on the other hand, produce slightly elongated clicks in groups of between three and forty. Scientists refer to these individual click groups as codas. Members of this species of whale regularly engage in emitting codas as they swim beside each other.
The researchers who worked on this specific study were able to source a database of nine thousand sperm whale codas that had been collected by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. They then used a combination of artificial intelligence and embedded equipment to try to extract patterns in these vocalisations. Bio-log tags were placed on members of the Eastern Caribbean sperm whale family. The team turned these vocalisations into visual data in order to study the underlying patterns in the communication.
As it turns out, sperm whales have used their codas as the building blocks for a quite advanced structured communication system. In fact, their system is so advanced that the study states that it can be considered a structured phonetic alphabet.
The sperm whales use a few different techniques to go from basic sounds to a more elaborate system of communication. The alteration of the tempo of the sounds they emit was one of the ways they achieved this. The researchers compared this to a rubato, a feature of musical sounds wherein the tempo increases sharply and then falls back to the original pace.
Similarly, researchers also found that the whales used ornamentation, or subtle changes within the codas to deploy them under different conversational contexts. Even more interesting is the fact that the codas themselves were observed to be used in a combinatorial fashion, making it possible to construct a quite elaborate sequence of messages using this technique.
Only Scratching The Surface
This study from the researchers at MIT is a breakthrough in our understanding of how whales communicate. At the same time, it only shows us just how far we need to go in understanding the lives of these and other creatures, animals that have complex social lives and elaborate group rituals.
As we delve deeper into the communication and cognition of these animals, we’re beginning to see that we might not be so unique after all. These findings serve as a reminder that we need to be ever more mindful of how we share this Earth with our fellow beings, human or otherwise.
