A now 39-year-old female humpback whale named Twain stopped to chat with researchers in a boat called the Blue Pearl off the southeast coast of Alaska. What resulted was a remarkable 20-minute conversation that took place in 2021. Since then, Dr. Brenda McCowan from the University of California, Davis, and SETI have been collaborating, utilizing AI to try to decode the whale’s vocalizations.
At the time, the encounter was possibly the “very first human-whale communication” using the whale’s native language. While the researchers couldn’t translate all that Twain said, they identified complex structural rules in her sounds. What first initiated that chat was playing recordings of a whale’s greeting sound, called “throp” or “whup” calls.
While the experiment was a breakthrough for human and animal communication, it could also help in the search for intelligent life in the universe.
Video of the communication with Twain via UC Davis:
Twain the Whale Meets Researchers
As the researchers played whale sounds from underwater microphones, Twain ignored them at first. But after three times, she became curious. At that point, she approached and responded with sounds, including some that resembled complex “conversational patterns.” For twenty minutes, she circled the boat. Finally, when they stopped playing the sounds, she moved on.
“Twenty minutes was all the researcher’s permit would allow. Twain stuck around until they stopped sending calls. Then she left, continuing to make “whoop” calls.
In all, Twain responded to the recordings at least 33 times.
“Wow! The whale we later identified as a 38-year-old female named Twain replied to our recorded whup call each of 33 times, engaging in conversational turn-taking as she remained a mere 100 meters from our vessel,” wrote researcher Jodi Frediani. “Twain periodically came to the surface to breathe, then dove back down and again joined in a call and response with our exemplar. Throughout the 20-minute exchange, Twain consistently matched the interval variations between each playback call, dynamically adjusted by Brenda in response to the whale’s own call timing. Effectively, Twain responded in a conversational style.”
A Moment of Exasperation?
At one point, Twain apparently showed signs of agitation or “exasperation.” Unlike her other vocalizations, she made wheezy blowing sounds. Then, she made what seemed like a disdainful hoot. (You can hear it on the UC Davis podcast.)
Possibly, Twain understood the sounds as her own recorded voice, taken from her familiar pod of whales. Was she thinking, “Why is that boat mimicking me and my friends?”
Listen to the podcast from UC Davis below, in which they compare the Twain encounter to a moment in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Intelligence Filters To Decode Whale Language
As the researchers explained, the effort to decode the humpback whale’s vocalizations uses “intelligence filters.” These filters attempt to classify nonhuman communication based on its level of complexity. Although AI is relatively new, the methods are built upon long-standing research.
The intelligence filters are informed by Information theory, developed in the late 1940s. That’s when American mathematician and scientist Claude Shannon published a groundbreaking paper on how information is transmitted through noisy telephone lines: “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.”
As Information theory has shown, there are similar observable properties in all human languages. Remarkably, these similarities are also evident in the sounds of whales.
“Human languages all tend to show similar mathematical properties,” explained McCowan. “So, what we want to do is apply those kind of mathematical principles to the calls and other kinds of signals of animals,” she continued.
In prior research on Bottlenose dolphins, the same approach has demonstrated that their whistles exhibit complex sequences comparable to those found in human language. Similar to the work with Twain, researchers employed statistical and linguistic rules, such as Zipf’s law for word frequencies, the law of meaning distribution, the law of abbreviation, and Menzerath’s law.
“The information theory of these laws suggests that humans and dolphins share cost-cutting principles of organization,” the dolphin research stated.
SETI’s Close Encounter with a Nonhuman Intelligence
In 2023, SETI reported on what they called “a close encounter with a nonhuman (aquatic) intelligence.” It was the day the Whale-SETI team interacted with Twain.
SETI’s Dr. Laurence Doyle said that Twain’s curious behavior seemed to support the assumption that extraterrestrials might also be interested in making contact. If so, studying whales may help them detect and understand their communications.
“Because of current limitations on technology, an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers. This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales,” said Dr. Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute, a co-author of the paper.
In all of the animal kingdom, humpback whale songs are among the most complex. Additionally, Doyle said the team chose to study humpback whales because they can sometimes produce sounds comparable to humans.
“They not only sound like all sorts of other animals but also can imitate human tempo and human frequency range. And, we’ve heard them doing that,” Doyle said. (see video below)
As scientists know, humpback whales form long-term relationships based on their abilities, such as skillfully creating bubble nets to catch fish. When they do this, they will team up with the most able hunters, which might be from other family groups or pods. As Doyle explained, evidence for this came from testing samples of mitochondrial DNA. As the hunting whales gathered, they would slap their tales on the surface, leaving behind the cell samples.
“They’re not families,” Doyle said of the hunting whales. “They build long-lasting relationships based on ability. Humans are the only other species we know that do that. So, maybe they’re socially closer to us than any other species,” Doyle said.
Below, Laurence Doyle discussed whale communication and SETI for the California Academy of Sciences:
Whale image via Pixabay/SarahRichterArt with a ‘UFO’ inserted by AI