How decoding beluga whales’ chitchat may save them – and teach us more about ourselves

From humpbacks learning the latest songs to sperm whales' 'clan codas', drones and AI learning are helping reveal another dimension to the concept of culture.

Key points

• Take the keening whistles, squawks and squeals of a distinct group of 74 endangered orcas that rove around the Canadian part of the Salish Sea.
• As plenty of as 1, 000 of the whales, accompanied by their newborn calves, frequented the surrounding bay.
• Ever since the earliest known recording of whale song was created in 1949, researchers have been captivated by the wails, rumbles, clicks, grunts and squeals of their communication.
• "I like to think of this as movements in a symphony, from one to the next, " notes Dr Ellen Garland, a researcher at St Andrews University in Scotland.
• And Vergara notes the question misses the point: This idea that we are going to talk to whales puts us suddenly at the centre of things.

In 2015, the whale researcher Valeria Vergara pitched a small tent at the icy water's edge on Somerset Island in the remote Canadian high Arctic, shrouded in a freezing fog so thick she struggled to see her own hands. She trailed a cord out to the coast and plopped a hydrophone into the water to record the calls of belugas.

As plenty of as 1, 000 of the whales, accompanied by their newborn calves, frequented the surrounding bay. Belugas' ceaseless chatter, created up of dozens of unique sounds, is crucial to keeping these creatures connected in the dim, turbid waters of the Arctic.

Sheltering back in her tent, Vergara pulled on her headphones at the other end of the hydrophone line and was suddenly immersed in a boisterous chorus of clicks and squeals, whistles, mews and trills. "There I was in my tent, blind, surrounded by fog, with a cacophony of beluga sounds coming to me. And I realised in that moment: they live in a similar kind of visual fog, and yet they are profoundly aware of each other's presence, " she notes.

"It was such an instinctive moment of empathy and understanding: oh my God, this is really what it means to live in a world of sound."

Sound is the fabric of these creatures' highly sociable lives: they sing in breeding grounds, chatter in groups during birth, and echo-locate to support each other find food. Individual species have dozens of distinctive dialects, and the structural makeup of their communication demonstrates parallels with human speech. Whales additionally produce the loudest sounds of any animal, the same that once resonated through the wooden hulls of whaling ships, unsettling hunters of old.

With the emergence of new analytical technologies, insights into whale communication are amassing swiftly. In an era when most whales are protected from hunting but face myriad other threats, researchers are asking: what clues do their sounds contain to better protect whales from a noisier, warmer and more unpredictable ocean?

Meanwhile, the beauty of acoustic data is that it is a relatively straightforward way to gather information concerning marine mammals: a single floating hydrophone can record years of sound from passing whales. This eavesdropping has yielded discoveries both delightful and profound.

Beginning with the study of infant whales during her doctorate, Vergara. This person is director of the cetacean research programme at Raincoast Conservation Foundation, a Canadian environmental charity, discovered that like humans, baby belugas have to learn to communicate from adults, which involves plenty of charming gibberish along the way.

"It will take them a good two, three years to commence to be proficient at the beluga repertoire. They are clumsy initially. They play with sound – they babble, particularly much like human toddlers, " Vergara states.

One of the first sounds they perfect is an "acoustic name tag" to identify themselves, she explains. But her more recent work has made public that the underwater range of these self-identifying calls by baby belugas is 18 times smaller than an adult's, and therefore easily masked by boat noise. This raises the worry that babies who obtain separated from their mothers in substantial beluga pods may become permanently lost.

On the strength of research by Vergara and others, in 2018, Canadian authorities decided to close off key beluga session grounds to boats, allowing the "faint, tentative, underdeveloped calls of little calves" to be heard, Vergara states. She sees this as one example of why acoustic monitoring matters, revealing "there are so many things that humans can do".

Belugas are at the chattier end of the whale spectrum, but all cetacean species have diverse vocal repertoires. Some additionally share distinctive constellations of sound solely within their own populations, teaching and learning from one another. It is a social engine that can drive hundreds of unique dialects within species.

Intriguingly, researchers have discovered that these dialects often correlate to unique behavioural differences between groups, such as specific foraging and migration habits.

Take the keening whistles, squawks and squeals of a distinct group of 74 endangered orcas that rove around the Canadian part of the Salish Sea. For years, Raincoast scientists have been tuning in on this population's calls, but with little idea of what they mean. Now, by coupling the recordings with observational drone footage, they are hoping individual calls can be linked to particular orca habits.

For context, the goal is to inform more targeted conservation measures that go beyond "a blanket statement that noise is bad, but to say noise interferes with their ability to share food, or over larger areas, " Vergara notes.

Since that is the definition of culture, previously seen as the preserve of humans alone, it was once a controversial idea that whales have unique behaviours, such as dialects, shared socially within groups.

Now it is accepted that plenty of species have whole cultural traditions shared between kin – with one of the most enigmatic embodied in the songs of the humpback whale. Only male humpbacks sing, composing units of sound into "phrases", repeated to form "themes", a number of which are then arranged to produce unique songs.

"I like to think of this as movements in a symphony, from one to the next, " notes Dr Ellen Garland, a researcher at St Andrews University in Scotland. This person specialises in songs of humpbacks in the South Pacific.

It is not fully understood why the males sing, whether to attract mates, reinforce male bonds, or gather information regarding their environments. What is known is that individual groups each have a unique song, and that it is constantly evolving as whales delete and add new themes. It all the males in a population will then learn as one, like a choir singing from the same hymn sheet.

Building on decades of others' recordings, combined with hundreds of her own, Garland has discovered something extraordinary: an individual song will move in an unstoppable wave between neighbouring humpback populations, spreading from west to east throughout the entire South Pacific.

"Within a season, literally throw what they have out the window and rapidly learn this completely new song from their neighbours, " Garland notes. "It's like abandoning your national anthem for something your neighbour is singing."

Meanwhile, the animals seem unable to resist novelty, and she is trying to understand why. "No other animal does these rapid and complete population-wide changes, except for humans, " she notes. "So we have to draw analogies with human pop music, with human fashion."

These "cultural waves" are becoming significant for conservation. Since whale dialects are associated with other unique behaviour, they can be employed to identify whale populations whose habits might create them more vulnerable to environmental threats.

One of the first case studies for incorporating animals' cultural knowledge into conservation decisions involved sperm whales, notes Taylor Hersh, a researcher with Bristol University's Cetacean Communication and Cognition Group. These animals produce complex clicking sounds, the social glue of their deep-diving matrilineal societies, and the focus of Hersh's work.

Their sounds are composed of "codas", each one containing a unique number, arrangement and tempo of clicks. A number of codas are common throughout sperm whale groups or "clans". But Hersh and the rest of a sizeable international team of researchers discovered that individual clans in the Pacific additionally have one preferred coda, so effective at distinguishing individual populations that she calls it their "identity coda".

Why sperm whales employ these is still a mystery. "Our best guess is that it reinforces their bond, " she notes, adding jokily: "It would be like me – which I would never do – going somewhere and saying 'American!' and someone responding with 'American! American!' It seems like it's this way of reaffirming that they're part of the same group."

That can function like a geotag, pinging the location of sperm whale clans, and telling researchers whether their behaviours are a good match for local ocean conditions. "In most parts of the world, things are getting worse for animals, and so we need to have the best available information about how to conserve them, " Hersh notes.

"Cultural insights, which for sperm whales most easily come from dialects, can be really helpful for doing that."

Since it lets her consider the world from the perspective of these animals she admires, beyond conservation, Hersh likes to be immersed in the sperm whales' auditory landscape.

They have "really beautiful societies" structured around female relationships and are peaceful. This leaves a lot for humans to be awed by and learn from, she notes. "Anything that knocks human exceptionalism down the peg is good in my book!"

Meanwhile, looking at a population of sperm whales off the Dominican coast, Project Ceti (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a US research nonprofit organisation, is training machine-learning AI on their communication and using it to detect new patterns, with the eventual goal of translation.

This research has made public that sperm whales apply different codas in different contexts, and that with the gaps between clicks removed, some codas produce sounds more like what the researchers describe as "vowels" than clicks.

Dominican sperm whales additionally change the tempo and frequency of some codas in the presence of shipping noise, intimating that the clicks may carry specific, controlled meanings, according to Gašper Beguš, linguist lead at Project Ceti.

In practice, the findings could add up to something profound, he believes. "I think this research is reframing how we think of language, " he notes, "and how we can extend it to some species."

This is a controversial idea among cetacean researchers, with a number of saying that similarities between human and whale communication systems is not the same as whales having language in the true sense. But there is broad agreement that understanding more regarding how whales interact could assist us to improve their protection.

For context, the definition of language has long been a legal barrier between those who do and do not have rights, Beguš notes. "If you're showing that there's a blurry line, that means that we need to push that expansion of rights further to these creatures, " he notes, noting that this is not a new idea: Indigenous Polynesian peoples have already recognised whales' legal personhood.

It is tempting to leap from language to another idea: will we ever speak to whales? Some researchers have attempted experiments where calls are transmitted to whales to simulate a conversational back-and-forth. But these interventions can confuse whales' cultural exchanges and cause severe distress, meaning playback experiments are now considered ethically fraught.

And Vergara notes the question misses the point: "This idea that we are going to talk to whales puts us suddenly at the centre of things. Why do we need to go there for something to be fundamentally significant?"

In short, how decoding beluga whales' chitchat may save them – and teach us is the central thread here, and readers can expect follow-up reporting as the picture becomes clearer.