The scientists found that sperm whales have their own version of an alphabet for communication.
Sperm whale calls are much more complicated than we realized. They might be a type of animal talk that’s almost as sophisticated as human language.
According to Rus, “They dive together, they eat together, they hunt together. There is so much collaboration, and we hear their vocalizations while they do all these activities, so the question is, what does all this stuff mean?”The researchers discovered that sperm whales have their own version of an alphabet for communication, made up of elements like “rhythm,” “tempo,” “rubato,” and “ornamentation.” These elements combine to create different patterns of clicks called codas.
What’s even more interesting is that whales can combine these basic parts in different ways to make lots of different sounds. Pratyusha Sharma, an MIT Ph.D student, elaborates on this discovery, stating, “This isn’t just about teaching animals a subset of human language, but decoding a naturally evolved communication system within their unique biological and environmental constraints.”
To make sense of all these sounds, researchers developed a kind of “phonetic alphabet” for sperm whale clicks. Also, like how we make words by putting letters together, the whales make their own “words” by combining different click patterns in sequences.Rus explains that they’re using machine learning to understand how whales communicate and predict their next moves.
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