This marine biologist thinks we might soon learn to speak with whales

Who's in the Video David Gruber David Gruber is the Founder & President of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a nonprofit, interdisciplinary scientific and conservation initiative on a mission to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales. Go to Profile The Well This marine biologist thinks we might soon learn to speak with whales Ninety million years after our lineages split, humans are beginning to listen to whales in a new way. Marine biologist David Gruber shares the work that has become his life’s pursuit: learning how to hear the planet’s largest mammals. ▸ 12 min — with David Gruber Description Transcript Copy a link to the article entitled http://This%20marine%20biologist%20thinks%20we%20might%20soon%20learn%20to%20speak%20with%20whales Share This marine biologist thinks we might soon learn to speak with whales on Facebook Share This marine biologist thinks we might soon learn to speak with whales on Twitter (X) Share This marine biologist thinks we might soon learn to speak with whales on LinkedIn Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. Subscribe

At A Night of Awe and Wonder, marine biologist David Gruber, founder of  Project CETI and a National Geographic Explorer, traces the extraordinary journey linking humans and whales, from our shared ancestors to what we’re learning about their rich underwater communications. Through wartime recordings, bioacoustics pioneers, and cutting-edge AI, he shows how scientists are attempting to decode the phonetic alphabet of sperm whales and begin translating their ancient language. Gruber argues that understanding whale communication could reshape our sense of intelligence, ourselves, and our connection to life on Earth.

DAVID GRUBER: Thank you all. It's a pleasure to be here. This is a real honor to be talking about awe.

And I'm gonna start out right now, I'm gonna take us on a, on a back, on a human journey. We're gonna go way back to the last time we had a common ancestor to the mighty sperm whale.

So, alright, it doesn't look all that great here. This is a bit humbling here. So this road diverged 90 million years ago, these are like a magna order of placental mammals that include giraffes, zebras, dogs, cats, rabbits, bats, primates, as well as whales.

This begins in an era where there's still dinosaurs on the earth. And as that is the last time that we were connected to whales, well as primates, us weird primates, we continued down our own craft and have our own human journeys. The whales took a very separate, they took a very different path. They went into the water.

Just imagine that they're considered the poster childs of macro evolution. Like imagine one day just deciding like, I'm gonna go back into the water and I'm gonna sleep in the water. I'm gonna eat in the water, I'm gonna drink in the water, give birth in the water.

This is everything. Their nose rolls over their head and becomes a blowhole. The skin thickens. So imagine just being in the, in the bathtub for too long and you pruning no longer needing fresh water. These are all the things that would need to happen for an animal that had once lived on land. And we all came from the ocean. They went back, we came onto land and they went back in.

So that's kind of weird, you know, in one way. But the last time we were connected was 90 million years ago. It's a long time ago. And this is the story as we know it. And I had a really fun time kind of putting this together and, and sharing this with you today. And this is based on paleontological and as well as evolutionary molecular evolution.

So the first whale is known as Paki, and this was this wolf-like thing that was just spending a little bit of time in the water. It's, it's relatives are like hippopotamus-day. The hippopotamus and its eyes kind of went up to the telescope to the top of the head, spending just, you know, some time in the water. It's coming back in at night. And that's 50 million years ago.

Then we go to 48 million years ago, and then we get to an animal called Ambul Setti, which is known as the walking whale with these big hind limbs. And this is now something about the size of a sea lion that is there.

And then we move, finally, we move to Basillas sous at around 40 million years ago. And we get the first fully aquatic marine mammal, the first whale. The hips kind of de—the pelvis detaches from the spine. They're spending their full time in the ocean.

And then we move into, finally now at about 32 million years ago, we move to Semio, which makes the first occi or tooth whale. And this brings us to the modern whales.

So the modern whales are citations. So there's 94 species, 15 of them are baline. You're probably all familiar with the baline whales like the humpback and the fin whale. Then the others are tooth whales. These include the, the sperm, sperm whales and the orcas and the dolphins.

So why sperm whales? And this is the animal that I'm gonna be sharing about today. They have this ability to, to make noise and echolocate underwater. But back to semio status at 32 million years ago, they already knew that it had the facial cranial structural to be able to echolocate. So already had this ability to make sounds underwater.

And seafarers had heard these sounds of whales for centuries, you know, millennia, the histories of sirens. People that were in wooden hull boats could hear these haunting sounds, which sounded like, sounded like mermaids. So there was a lot of hearing but not actually knowing.

And then western technology really first started to put its ear to the water in the 1940s era in World War II. And sadly, this was for more militaristic purposes for looking for submarines. And at the same time they were listening to submarines, they heard this underwater world was this symphony of biological sounds. It wasn't just the silent world.

And one of the scientists that I like to call attention to is Marie Fish, one of the early scientists—a great name. I'm like, David Gruber could not compare to Marie Fish. I'm like, you know, she's a ringer in terms of that. Like, I can't, I can't, I can't compete with that.

But, and also look at these outfits here, by the way, in the 1920s. She's actually working on a William Beebe expedition and she's actually looking at Sargassum right here, finding out that the American eel larvae are actually in the middle of the Sargassum Sea. And that they made that journey.

So she had then turned her ear to Bioacoustics and especially was working with the Office of Naval Research after World War II, transcribing all that they'd heard from submarines. And you could also imagine that at this time, this was not as joyous to the submariners that were underwater that started to hear these marine mammals, which some of them actually sounded like gunshots, like this one.

(Audio plays.)

So that's actually a sperm whale.

And so Frank Watlington, another naval engineer, he's working off the coast of Bermuda in the 1960s. He's working on a project called SOSUS, the Sound Underwater Surveillance System, where they wired up the whole underwater so they could hear the Russian submarines. And little did he know that in these recordings that he was making off of the coast of Bermuda, that he was recording the anthem. That became the anthem of a generation.

(Audio plays.)

Ooh. These songs made their way to Roger and Katie Payne and their collaborators, Scott McFe at the time. And in 1960—and in 1970—they began to kind of notice that there were actual patterns in these and they were repeating themselves after about 30 minutes. This was the famous article called "Songs of the Humpback Whale," which was on the cover of Science Magazine.

And it was—Roger kind of taught me that like, science does not have to be complicated: Whales sing. I'm like, God, I'm like trying to do like somersaults. Here it is.

(Audio plays.)

He put those together on his friend that made CRM radio—CRM Records—and not only was it on the cover of Science, he made his own record with this. He went around the world. These made it into Star Trek. If you've seen the Voyager. These really became—this led to one of the most successful environmental movements, “Save the Whales,” of all time and led to saving several whale species from extinction.

And Roger was my friend and my mentor. He passed away two years ago, but he was—when I approached him in 2018—he was the first whale biologist to take me serious when I said the window had finally opened for humans to use advanced machine learning and robotics to translate what whales are saying.

I remember Roger saying, like, imagine how far I got with knowing that whales sing. Imagine if we knew what they were saying.

And this led to, in 2020, the foundation of our nonprofit organization, Project SETI, which is the Cetacean Translation Initiative. We're inspired by the SETI, which is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. We're the inter-terrestrial unit.

We're based on two decades of research in Dominica by our lead whale biologist, Shane Jarrow, who has been, you know, really just listening to these—about two to 400 female whales that live off the coast there in these units. And he knows almost every one of them by name as an individual.

And we've been constructing an underwater recording studio there, which is 20 by 20 kilometers, and been inventing all kinds of listening apparatus. Rob Wood at the Harvard Robotics Lab has been making us all kinds of devices that drones could gently put little Fitbits on the back of whales’ backs.

And this has now led to the largest interspecies communication effort in history, now with over 50 scientists from eight disciplines all working together just to know, what are whales saying?

But I'll say it's not always been easy. You know, seawater and electronics are not the best bedfellows. And there have been times when I just thought, this is not gonna work. You know, four years into this journey, or is this worth it? Or are we on the right track?

And some of the fruits are just starting to grow now. So I'll just share a few of our findings and also some of the new findings that you'll be hearing about soon.

So one early finding is a sperm whale phonetic alphabet. Yes, an alphabet. Their alphabet is based on musical components—rhythm, tempo, vibrato, and ornamentation. They can use these in both context and combinational sequences.

And then soon we'll be recording from our linguist on the team, Gasper Begus, that whales actually have features like vowels and diphthongs in their voices, which expands the possibility. Their communication system is vastly more complex than we ever, ever imagined.

We will be having a language model that could predict just by the whale's voices when they might dive. And soon one of our—or part of our team who's worked with Shafi Gold will have a translative model called WHAM—Whale Acoustic Model—where you speak into it and outcomes “we whale.” And right now we're at the stage we're all baby whales. We're able to, like, figure out our first words, but we don't actually know what it's saying yet.

So we're actually now able to kind of interact with a synthetic whale as we begin to crack this portal open for humanity as interspecies communication becomes possible.

You know, this is a time of a huge amount of possibility. We've now seen technology become incredibly divisive and could really rip people apart.

But can this be a way that this can bring us together? Can this kind of a deeper understanding of animal intelligence and language, can it represent like a Copernican shift? That we're not the center of the universe, that humankind—we could appreciate that we're not the only species on this planet that possess rich internal and communal lives.

And I think I get really inspired by—by 52 years ago, Carl Sagan, who was studying the cosmos, but kind of he was saying at the time that he didn't wanna go into cetaceans because most of the work was anecdotal and the hard scientific work wasn't there. I wish Carl was here ’cause he would've actually appreciated that there we are getting to those data sets.

But he has this quote here saying, "Is it possible that the intelligence of cetaceans is channeled into the equivalent of epic poetry history? And elaborate codes of social interaction? Are whales and dolphins like human Homers before the invention of writing, telling of great deeds gone by in the depths and far reaches of the sea?"

I've—as far as I'm concerned, everything's possible until it's not.

Thank you.

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