UC Berkeley Scientists Hail Breakthrough In Decoding Whale Communication

UC Berkeley researchers working with Project CETI discovered that sperm whales produce vowel-like sounds embedded in their click codas, suggesting a far more complex communication system than previously understood. 'It was striking just how structured the system was. I've never seen anything like that before with other animals,' Begus, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor and the linguistics lead at Project CETI, told SFGATE. 'We're showing the world that there's more than meets the eye in sperm whales and that, if one cares to look closely, they're not as alien. We're much more similar to each other than we used to think.' SFGATE reports: With the help of a machine-learning model to identify patterns, Begus and his team combed through recordings collected from social units of sperm whales off the coast of the island of Dominica between 2005 and 2018. When they sped up the audio, removing the silences between clicks, they heard new patterns. They found acoustic properties that share similarities with two vowels -- a and i -- and several vowel combinations.

'Before, people were looking just at the timing and the number of clicks exchanged between sperm whales, but now we have to look at the frequencies, too. A whole new set of patterns have appeared,' Begus said. 'Now, it's one of the most complex non-human communication systems we have observed.' Begus said the research only shows how much more we have to learn about whales' style of communicating. He is particularly interested in exploring how the system may differ for whales between regions and how whale babies learn to communicate in this way. Most importantly, he wants to understand the meaning behind the sounds, as a 'window into whale thoughts and lives.' The research was published in the journal Open Mind.

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