Name: How scientists are piecing together a sperm whale ‘alphabet’
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How scientists are piecing together a sperm whale ‘alphabet’

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Any scientist will tell you that sperm whales are long-lived, highly intelligent, and super social animals.But at the same time, a conundrum has plagued those who have spent decades listening in on the cetaceans’ conversations. For animals that clearly lead complex lives, they sure don’t seem to have very much to say.“If you were to listen to the sounds of sperm whales, or even plot them, like how they're traditionally plotted, it could look like the whales just make the same sounds over and over again,” says Pratyusha Sharma, a Ph.D. student at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.But now, in a study published in Nature Communications, Sharma and her co-authors have invented an entirely new way to look at sperm whale communication—a method that reveals far more complexity that has ever been seen before. (Read about a groundbreaking effort to decode whale language.)Sperm whale vocalizations are arranged in at least 150 known repeatable patterns, known as codas. Previously, scientists analyzed these codas in isolation. But by plotting the codas in relation to each other, and zeroing in on new variables including rhythm, tempo, the length of sounds, and extra sounds that might change a coda’s meaning, the new research has for the first time revealed what the scientists call a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.”

Any scientist will tell you that sperm whales are long-lived, highly intelligent, and super social animals.But at the same time, a conundrum has plagued those who have spent decades listening in on the cetaceans’ conversations. For animals that clearly lead complex lives, they sure don’t seem to have very much to say.“If you were to listen to the sounds of sperm whales, or even plot them, like how they're traditionally plotted, it could look like the whales just make the same sounds over and over again,” says Pratyusha Sharma, a Ph.D. student at the Computer Science and Artificial...

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How scientists are piecing together a sperm whale ‘alphabet’

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