Do you remember when I posted something about the Voyager spacecraft, a rocket now 15 billion miles from Earth and going further, and how it’s ability to transmit data to NASA was compromised by a faulty computer chip? And how NASA engineers were able to identify the chip, create a work around, and enable Voyager to start transmitting information back to Earth again? Extraordinary, I think we all agreed.

That post was based on an article in the Washington Post. Today, I am writing about what I think is equally fascinating – this time from the July-August edition of Harvard Magazine. The article was written by Jonathan Shaw, the magazine’s managing editor. It’s titled “The Language of Whales”. Let’s see if I can do it justice.

First, the basics. We are talking about sperm whales. When you think of a whale, chances are you think of a sperm whale. Sperm whales, in spite of being hunted by humans for ages, are not an endangered species. They are found all over the world. They grow to be very large – the average adult sperm whale is about 50 feet or more in length. They live almost as long as humans – usually between 60 and 70 years (in fact, as whales only sleep about an hour or two per 24 hours, maybe you could say they live longer than humans). They spend most time under water and can dive thousands of feet down, and they really eat a lot of squid, which they have to locate. They also have, by far, the heaviest, largest brains in the animal kingdom.

The question is language. It has long been known that whales can make clicking sounds, very very loud rhythmic clicking sounds. As to loud? They are the loudest sounds made by any species.

But what do these sounds signify? Are they just sounds? Are they warnings? Or could they be sophisticated, linguistic communications? As for this last question – until recently it would probably never be asked.

The article talks about Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), which is looking to determine if humans will be able to understand and translate the meaning of the whales’ clicking and, for the next step, whether humans and whales will ever beg able to talk to each other. This effort started only seven years ago, at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, when two scientists, David Gruber of the City University of New York and Shafi Goldwasser of MIT, had a chance encounter, then joined by Michael Bronstein, who now teaches at Oxford. The three were, I believe, all fellows at the Radcliffe Institute when they began thinking about deciphering the clicks of sperm whales. Two years later, they organized another Radcliffe conference on this topic, decided the project was worthwhile, and received enough money from the TED Audacious Project to continue the project for the next five years. (Don’t know TED Audacious Project – Google it – it’s basically a source of funding for “audacious projects”.)

The project is audacious, to be sure. For example, there is a Harvard scientist, who has recorded about 10,000 instances of sperm whale clicking. That sounds like a lot, but to do what they want to do, those working on Project CETI think they will need billions of recordings. In addition, they want to be able to identify the individual whales making the sounds, so they have to tag the whales. Did you ever try to tag a whale? In the first place, these tags aren’t just post-its. According to the article, they record “sound, location, light, depth, temperature” and sometimes even have video. They are obviously very complex and, considering you are dealing with an animal whose skin is very slippery and whose skin continually sloughs off, and an animal who operates at such differing depths and pressures, coming up with a type of tag which would not fall off the whale’s body is beyond tricky. The amount of science in the development of these instruments (a better word, perhaps than tags) is itself remarkable.

Sperm whales do a lot of migrating. And this world is quite big. So tagging a sperm whale will do little good if you can’t keep track of the whale. It turns out that the only place in the world where the whale population is stable year round is near the island of Dominica, in the Caribbean, so that is where the scientists have set up shop.

As to what they are hearing, let me quote from the article:

“…they have detected previously unknown complexities in the sounds generated by the whales.

“In the past, sperm whale codas [that is the term used to refer to the rhythms] have been analyzed principally in terms of the number of clicks and the intervals between them. A representative discovery, for example, deemed in shorthand by the researchers as the discovery of a ‘whale phonetic alphabet’ , as reported last September by a team at MIT, detailed detection of ‘fine-grained modulation of inter-click intervals relative to preceding codas’, as well as the addition of an extra click to existing codas, that change depending on the context in which the whales were vocalizing. The researchers also documented independent changes in rhythm and tempo. When combined, these elements suggested complexity of the click communications of a magnitude greater than previously suspected.”

And then add a linguist, Gaspar Begus of the University of California at Berkeley, who says that his study of the clicks reveals “the presence of acoustic properties in codas that are analogous to the vowels and diphthongs in human speech, and that they seem “not to be artifacts, but rather are under the whales’ control”.

If you can get a hold of this article, read the entire piece. One more example of “who knew?”