Scientists claim to have had the first face-to-face conversation with a whale.
The SETI Institute and University of California team ‘talked’ to a 38-year-old humpback whale, named Twain, off the coast of Alaska.
They used an underwater microphone to send whale calls, ‘whup/throp’ sounds and received 36 responses that sounded as if Twain was actively engaged in a communicative exchange.
AI-powered algorithms analyzed the responses and revealed that Twain may have shared a hello call with the team on a ship in the Pacific Ocean.
While talking to a different species has never been done this way, researchers are using the experience to hopefully one day converse with extraterrestrial life.
Twain, a 38-year-old female humpback whale (pictured) communicated with researchers 36 times over a 20-minute period. Investigators said it’s possible the communication was a back-and-forth “Hello.”
Researchers hope that the interaction with Twain could lead to communications with extraterrestrials because the whale’s language is so complex that it forces researchers to identify what its vocalizations mean.
In the absence of aliens, researchers hope to use whales to develop non-human communication strategies.
Humpback whales are a good alien representative due to their very high intelligence and powers of communication.
“Humpback whales are very socially complex,” said lead author of the research Brenda McCowan. University of Davis.
‘They travel great distances. They have a huge vocal repertoire. I always say that all the sounds made in the natural world are made by the humpback. The diversity of sounds they produce is incredible.’
The team found Twain with a capsule in the Pacific Ocean and decided it was the best place to deploy the underwater microphones.
Twain left the pod and joined the team on their boat, allowing researchers to capture the first one-on-one conversation with a whale, along with the pod’s chatter as they hunted for their next meal.
Twain was part of a capsule (pictured) that researchers initially recorded to use their own sounds to elicit a response. The next day, Twain was separated from the capsule when researchers played sounds from it on an underwater speaker.
Pods of whales swim in circles to capture their prey, and researchers are trying to understand how they communicate during this process.
Although some sounds the whales made could be socialization noises, researchers think they could be giving commands, such as telling each other to go up or down.
For example, the team suggested that the whales could be telling each other to “blow the net deeper” or even saying “idiot” as an emotional response.
The team told UC Davis that when they first dropped the underwater microphones they didn’t hear anything, but they weren’t worried because the whales had traveled thousands of miles from Hawaii and were feeding.
They searched until they found a group vocalizing among themselves and tried again to record what they were saying.
The next day, researchers threw the speakers and recorders into the water and played the recording of the sounds when a whale surfaced near the ship.
Dr. Brenda McCowan (left) and Dr. Fred Sharpe played a pre-recorded greeting on the water as Twain approached his research vessel.
It took three attempts before Twain responded to the call and each time after, the response grew louder and McCowan attempted to match the pitch of the whale’s responses, who then adjusted his latency to match the recording.
Researchers created the underwater communication technology by using sophisticated hydrophones (an underwater recording device) and artificial intelligence algorithms that record and analyze the sounds whales make.
The AI is trained with data from whale songs and human language and looks for language patterns and structures.
Twain’s continued response to the recording could have arisen from the previous day’s recording, according to researchers who said it turned out the whale had been part of that pod.
“It’s very possible that this particular call was very salient to her, either because she…it was a member of her group that was producing the call, or perhaps even her own call,” McCowan told UC Davis, He added: “I just don’t know.
But this was a call she would have been familiar with in one way or another. And maybe that’s why she responded so directly to everything and she stayed with us for 20 minutes.
In it research workthe team suggested that Twain’s response was motivated by “emotion and possibly the onset of agitation.”
When researchers stumbled upon the capsule in Alaska, Twain began circling the ship while researchers played recorded sounds of humpback whales.
The six researchers working for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) set out to understand humpback whale communication and hope it can help when they connect with extraterrestrials.
“Due to current limitations of technology, an important assumption in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in establishing contact and will therefore target human recipients,” stated Dr. Laurance Doyle from the SETI Institute and co-author of the article.
“This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales,” he added.
“To our knowledge, this has probably been the most elaborate acoustic exchange recorded to date with a baleen whale,” Fred Sharpe, co-author of the paper, told UC Davis.
‘And the way it was carried out and the fact that the animal stayed around for so long and temporarily interacted with us. “It opens the door to more dynamic playback.”