On Project CETI and communicating with whales

When I think of translating what whales could be saying, I think of it as one-way translation, like predictive models where you start writing a sentence, and it knows what’s going to come next. I am super curious to know what they are saying; I’ve spent enough time watching them make sounds and then do things. But I don’t have the ego to expect that they would want to tell me anything. If we’re able to predict the coda sequences [the basic units of sperm whale communication] and we can start predicting behaviour and then see that happen, that to me will be huge. It speaks not necessarily to the structure of their linguistic capacity or all these amazing things that humans have, but it speaks to an internal life in a being that’s so different from us, which is really hard to access.

On getting to know whales as individuals

As a caveat, when we started giving names to the whales, we never thought they would be in Canadian Geographic! You meet dozens and dozens of animals, and the names were really shorthand for us to remember them. We recognize them by the trailing edge of their tail. “Fingers” was the one that had two marks that looked like fingers giving the peace sign. And there’s one that I love dearly — she’s a very large older female that flukes very beautifully named “Fruit Salad” because she was the one we took a picture of while eating fruit salad. And while they have formal names now — every family has a letter and every baby born in that family gets a name with that letter — a lot of those silly nicknames just stuck. But our science has shown that individuals matter in their social networks, and we know them as individuals — some of them longer than I’ve known my kids.

There’s a family that we know really well, where one of the males named “Alan” was at an age where he should be leaving the family. But last summer, we witnessed a sperm whale being born in that family — it was incredible — and Alan was present for it, because it was clearly such a big family event. I’ve known Alan since he was a first year calf, and it made me go back and look at photos, as if it was a memory of my kids that popped up on my iPhone or something — “Aw, so great, look how small he was!” So, yeah, we know these whales.

On understanding sperm whale intelligence

It’s hard to find an explanation for how complex and rich sperm whale behaviour is without accepting that they have some kind of internal level of cognition. And the behaviours that we see, like group decision-making, movement and babysitting, may be mediated through sound, or may not. There’s this amazing problem with echolocation called “perception entanglement.” If I can see through your eyes and you can see through my eyes, I don’t have to ask you questions about what your room looks like. You don’t have to say, “Hey, Shane, where are you?” Because you can see out of my eyes all the time. And so, they may not have words for those kinds of questions, but that doesn’t mean that it’s lesser than the communication system we have. This work is ultimately about listening and building tools to understand what is important to something so different from us, in order to ask: how can we help?

On what humans can learn from sperm whales

One of the big takeaways about being a sperm whale is being a good neighbour. And humans have not been good neighbours. There are animals alive today that were alive back when we were still hunting and killing their species. And we’re really loud neighbors; we do not have noise violations after 11 p.m. at the bottom of the ocean like we have in our own cities. And there’s all of our plastics and our toxicology. So, I think [listening to them and better understanding their needs] is the first step toward being a better neighbour.