Researchers Develop ‘Sperm Whale Phonetic Alphabet’
Whales are pretty good at making noise. Hell, sperm whales can make sounds louder than jet engines. Those sounds, for the most part, are used for communicating, and we’ve long tried to find the Rosetta Stone that would allow us to understand what they’re saying. New research has gotten us quite a bit closer to that than we’ve ever been. Researchers studying the different variations of clicks and how they’re combined with each other have created something pretty spectacular: a sperm whale phonetic alphabet of sorts.
“Sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) are highly social mammals that communicate using sequences of clicks called codas,” the abstract of a new study published in Nature reads. “While a subset of codas have been shown to encode information about caller identity, almost everything else about the sperm whale communication system, including its structure and information-carrying capacity, remains unknown.”
There’s a hypothesis in science called the Social Complexity Hypothesis. In short, it says that animals living in complex societies that require team work, individual recognition, and social learning will require a system of communication. The more complex the society is, the more complex the language will be.
“To enable efficient communication, the meaning of most human utterances is underspecified and derived in part from the conversation that precedes them,” the authors of the paper explained. “To enable many distinct meanings to be communicated, humans access a large inventory of basic sounds (phonemes) by combining phonetic features like place of articulation, manner of articulation, then sequence phonemes to produce an unbounded set of distinct utterances… Understanding when and how aspects of human-like communication arise in nature offers one path toward understanding the basis of intelligence in other life forms.”
Since a sperm whale lives in pods consisting of 15-20 animals and require a form of communication, they have developed those distinctive clicking sounds.
“Scientists focussed on understanding variations in the structure of these codas found that the codas could be combined in different ways, with the musical concepts of rubato and ornamentation, as well as rhythm and tempo,” the researchers wrote. “These four classifications were seen to be combined in a multitude of different ways, making many distinguishable codas from the whale vocalizations.”
Like any good research team, they used an enormous dataset. With the help of 9,000 codas pulled from over 10 years of audio from the sperm whale families of the Eastern Caribbean clan, they found that the whales are almost definitely using a form of what could be considered a language.
“These whales have a more complex combinatorial communication system that demonstrates rubato and ornamentation, in which whales make sub-second adjustments to match one another as they converse and add extra clicks to known coda types depending on the context within their conversations,” said Dr. Shane Gero, Biology Lead of Project CETI and co-founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project, in statement sent to IFLScience.
Although we don’t yet understand what, exactly, the newly discovered coda structures mean, it is a huge leap in understanding that they exist at all. It proves that the system of communication used by sperm whales is far more intricate than previously believed.
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