WANASAYANSI WANAJIFUNZA LUGHA YA NYANGUMI

 Scientists are learning to speak whale language

A whale with its baby

It was in 2021, off the coast of southeast Alaska, that a team of six scientists played a recording of the greeting through an underwater speaker.

They were stunned when they discovered a whale they called Twain when he responded to the sound.

"It's amazing," says Josie Hubbard, an animal behaviorist at the University of California, Davis who was also on board.

"You have to turn off the vessel several meters away from where the whales are. on this occasion, the 38-year-old Twain went to the vessel, and circled it for 20 minutes,” says Hubbard.

When Twain left, Hubbard went under the vessel and then they discovered that the whale was responding to the voice of the speaker for all 20 minutesa long sound that comes and goes, with pulses and hums.

Scientists put recording equipment in the sea to collect whale sounds

Dan Chernov

Whales exhibit a long list of human-like behaviors. they cooperate with each other and other creatures. They teach each other life skills, like taking care of children and playing.

Unlike humans, they use more sound than sight in most of their activities. Their sound can travel farther and faster in water than it does in air.

Cetaceans, for example, rely on noise to communicate with each other, travel, find mates and food, protect their territories and resources, and avoid predators.

their children cry like human babies, some are believed to have names, and their groups from different parts of the ocean have regional dialects.

Whales have been heard mimicking the dialects of alien groups - and some are thought to even imitate the human voice.

The first recording of whale songs was recorded in 1952 by US Navy engineer Frank Watlington.

About 20 years later, marine biologist Roger Payne discovered these sounds were organized by repetition. this changed the understanding of whale sounds and sparked an interest that led to decades of research.

What's next

Researchers hope that analyzing the sounds of whales can help us understand their sounds. Researchers speculate that whale sounds have a meaningful message.

however, they say, our understanding of whale communication is still in its infancy.

Throughout the audio exchange, Twain occasionally made a sound depending on when the speaker's sound came out. If every 10 seconds he made a sound every second. they did it 36 ​​times in 20 minutes.

"The biggest challenge for us is to understand those sounds and determine their meaning, so that we can know the meaning. I think AI will help us do that," says Brenda McCowan, a researcher in the team.

More than 5,000 miles (8,000 km) apart, a group of experts in artificial intelligence, natural language, authors, linguists, marine biologists, roboticists - hope to use AI - to decipher whale sounds.

Another team launched in 2020, Ceti (Cetacean Translation Initiative), led by marine biologist David Gruber, has been recording a group of whales off the coast of Dominica, a Caribbean island, using microphones on buoys, robotic fish and fixed equipmenton the backs of whales."It's hard for us to understand their world, beyond these very brief vocal interactions. This is a unique, gentle creature, and there's just so much going on in its life," says Gruber.

"Each time we research, we find more complexity and new forms in their communication."

he believes we will reach a point of technological development where we will probably be able to understand whale communication.

The collected information is being analyzed using machines to discover the meaning of the sounds, and the results will be published in 2024.

samantha Blakeman, marine data manager for the National Oceanography Center, "AI can allow us to understand the communication systems of many other species. I think it will be a good thing for the world - if we care about what the whales say."