Scientists have tried for many years to decipher the language of sperm whales. These animals live in clans with a complex social structure. They communicate using a series of short clicks called “codas” that resemble the Morse Code.
🆕 Researchers from MIT, in collaboration with Project CETI, applied generative AI tools capable of classifying and analyzing animal sounds. They found that sperm whales use a much richer set of sounds than previously known. Their “communication style” is similar to that of humans. The scientists called the discovery the “sperm whale phonetic alphabet”.
The AI model was trained on a dataset of about 9,000 codas recorded over 13 years from Eastern Caribbean whales. This clan lives off the coast of Dominica and consists of about 400 animals.
It turned out that, depending on the context, whales change the rhythm and tempo of the signals and add clicks to emphasize important elements of the “message,” similar to how humans stress keywords or express emotions with intonation.
💬 What do sperm whales want to say?
Scientists hypothesize that the codas may carry information, such as coordinating hunting or caring for babies. Additional clicks could indicate the animal's age or social status. Each clan also has its own “dialect.”
Accurate “translation” from their language is the next task the scientists hope to accomplish with AI.
👍 What is the benefit of the discovery?
The study of sperm whale language is breaking new ground in understanding animal intelligence and creating ways to communicate with them.
In using machine learning to detect the clicks, we found that there were so many more clicks than people could manually segment from the data set. It really turned out that sperm whale communication was indeed not random or simplistic but rather structured.
Daniela Rus, director of the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab
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