Diana Reiss, a marine mammal behavior and communication expert at the City University of New York, said that scientists understand certain aspects of marine animals’ communication reasonably …
ROSEAU, Dominica — Scientists studying the sperm whales that live around the Caribbean island of Dominica have described for the first time the basic elements of how they might be talking to each other, in an effort that could one day help better protect them.
“We’re now starting to find the first building blocks of whale language,” said David Gruber, founder and president of the Cetacean Translation Initiative or CETI, an effort devoted to translating the communication of sperm whales. “It doesn’t appear that they have a fixed set of codas,” said Sharma, an artificial intelligence and computer science expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “That gives the whales access to a much larger communication system,” she said, explaining it was as if the whales had a very large dictionary.
To get enough examples of the sperm whale clicks in Dominica, where there is a resident population of about 200 whales, scientists created a giant underwater recording studio with microphones at different depths. Tags on the whales also record what position they are in when clicking — for example diving, sleeping, breathing at the surface — and if there are any other whales nearby they might be communicating with.
Sperm whales are classified as ” vulnerable ” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. The whales were hunted for centuries for the oil contained in their giant heads and the species is still recovering.
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