22 ms·

Scientists Find an 'Alphabet' in Whale Songs

252 points by tintinnabula 2y ago

pegasus 2y ago
No mention of birdsong in this article leaves me hanging. Surely birdsong has got to be much more studied, and must contain lots of complexity ripe to be plumbed for hidden meaning.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  AFAIK, pretty much all birdsong is telling other birds where you are and that either... 1. you want to mate! 2. you want others to stay away from your territory!
  - hnbad 2y ago
    IIRC there have been studies and they showed differences in the latter depending on the specific threat. But "birds" is a large group and studying "bird songs" is not any more helpful than studying "mammal noises" and I don't recall which species the study looked into. It's worth remembering though that "language" is a form of communication and communication is vital in all social species. "Come here, I'm a good mate and available" and "Go away, I'm big and scary" are the lowest common denominator so even non-social species usually have some way of expressing those sentiments. But the more complex a species' social dynamics are, the more likely it is they will have means of communication capable of reflecting that. It's also a mistake to look at utterances (mouth sounds) in isolation, especially when looking at a communication system we're unfamiliar with. Body language and facial expressions are a big deal in human communication even if we sometimes exclude them from analysis for simplicity. Not to mention that language features may be different if only because of the different biology (e.g. overtones, repetition or rhythm might carry semantics). In other words, what Arrival did with alien "written language" equally applies to non-human "spoken language". It would be a mistake to assume that all the concepts we use for analyzing human language would apply to forms of communication in other animals even if another animal's language might turn out to be similarly complex.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/photoshop/6/0/1/150601.jpg?v=1 https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/photoshop/6/0/1/150601.j...
utensil4778 2y ago
I'm really excited to see where ML takes us in cetacean linguistic research. I don't know if it will successfully translate whale song, but we'll learn a whole lot by trying. Whale song is about the closest thing we have to an alien language. It's very much worth studying with all the tools we have. Besides that, the 12 year old in me just screams look at the size of their brains! There has to be something going on in there. I really want to know what they have to say!
- stubish 2y ago
  The smarter birds are easier to study. As are the great apes and dolphins. Research has been finding it isn't brain size so much as density and architecture of particular parts that leads to what we call 'intelligence', and I would assume what we could call a 'conversation'. Not that we shouldn't study whale songs, but that the scope is much larger than you indicated. We can communicate with gorillas with English words (but not English grammar last I heard?), but I'm not sure if we even know what noises and gestures gorillas make that are communication or are just them clearing their throats. But I've gone past studies working out the vocabularies of birds and meerkats.
jimwhite 2y ago
Here is the blog post from Project CETI that did the research https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/sperm-whale-phonetic-alphabet-proposed-for-the-first-time https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/sperm-whale-phonetic-... Ridiculous how many articles repeat the NYT'$ paywalled headline but don't report any sources.
- spopejoy 2y ago
  > Rhythm, tempo, rubato and ornamentation can be freely combined. This gives rise to a large inventory of distinguishable codas — a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” that makes it possible to systematically explain observed variability in coda structure. It's remarkable how musical analysis is at the forefront here as a central categorizing schema. There's remains a lot of mystery surrounding human neurology with respect to music, but it seems tha music travels different pathways than verbal communications, while still having "liguistic" features. Music might even have vestigial function for us that birdsong and whalesong are still maintaining.
hiergiltdiestfu 2y ago
Is this article's source available somewhere else, non-paywalled?
- hiergiltdiestfu 2y ago
  https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8
xico 2y ago
https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28802 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28802
engineer_22 2y ago
Do whales have dialects or is it a global language
bradrn 2y ago
Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8
- vixen99 2y ago
  Much appreciated
- robxorb 2y ago
  The chart on page 6 (of the PDF) is fascinating, kind of sums up the findings visually.
djtango 2y ago
Who knew that the sentient life we were looking for were beneath our feet in our deep blue oceans rather than up above the stars.
- hatenberg 2y ago
  Oh we knew. Hyperion covers this topic quite well.
  - salomonk_mur 2y ago
    Douglas Adams had it right, as usual.
    - OnlyMortal 2y ago
      “So long and thanks for all the fish”
- BobbyTables2 2y ago
  Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
WaxProlix 2y ago
Can we tokenize these signals? A ripe new market for LLM-based solutions may be opening up!
- potatoman22 2y ago
  From the article: “I’ve no doubt that you could produce a language model that could learn to produce sperm-whale-like sequences,” Dr. Rendell said. “But that’s all you get.”
- gabesullice 2y ago
  If we could (we probably can), we'd have a fluent LLM that would generate sounds that we still couldn't understand.
  - pton_xd 2y ago
    Couldn't the LLM translate it to words that have similar embeddings in our own language? Translation is one of the tasks that LLMs excel at.
    - dotnet00 2y ago
      Don't you actually need manual translations to feed into the model first for that? AFAIK LLMs are not sci-fi-esque magic universal translators.
      - truculent 2y ago
        Not necessarily. For example: https://engineering.fb.com/2018/08/31/ai-research/unsupervised-machine-translation-a-novel-approach-to-provide-fast-accurate-translations-for-more-languages/ https://engineering.fb.com/2018/08/31/ai-research/unsupervis... > Training an MT model without access to any translation resources at training time (known as unsupervised translation) was the necessary next step. Research we are presenting at EMNLP 2018 outlines our recent accomplishments with that task. Our new approach provides a dramatic improvement over previous state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and is equivalent to supervised approaches trained with nearly 100,000 reference translations. To give some idea of the level of advancement, an improvement of 1 BLEU point (a common metric for judging the accuracy of MT) is considered a remarkable achievement in this field; our methods showed an improvement of more than 10 BLEU points. Although, this specific method does require the relative conceptual spacing of words to be similar between language; I don't see how that would be the case for Human <-> Whale languages.
ddon 2y ago
https://archive.is/7prpD https://archive.is/7prpD
- garciasn 2y ago
  Seems like the NYT found a way to fuck with archive.is. There’s a gigantic overlay blocking a ton of the content. Boo.
  - aspenmayer 2y ago
    I found this via the topbar history nav on archive.is when visiting the original link you’re replying to: https://archive.is/vwQ4Z https://archive.is/vwQ4Z also available on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240507155229/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/science/whale-song-alphabet.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240507155229/https://www.nytim...
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    It is an SVG loading indicator that's broken when embedded on the archive page, nothing to do with NYT trying to obfuscate archival tools.
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      >nothing to do with NYT trying to obfuscate archival tools // How would you know? Seems pretty likely based on how companies try to enshitify the web.
      - Etheryte 2y ago
        Looking at the code, there is nothing malignant going on, it's simply a common CSS + SVG bug. Most people wouldn't know how to intentionally write this so that it breaks on one page, but works on the other. Occam's razor etc.
  - cobbzilla 2y ago
    install uBlock Origin, block content element, it’s gone (until they change things to not match the selector anyway)
baerrie 2y ago
It is less like an alphabet, we already know that there is a discreet number of click clusters (basically an alphabet). Here they have found that the sperm whales modulate tempo of these clusters, rhythm within the clusters, add additional ornamental clicks, and change the rhythm of individual clicks within clusters over time (rubato). This adds an insane order of magnitude to their language much like our use of tone, context, and all the other ways we take our alphabet and enrich it with exponentially more meaning. This is the first time this has been proven in an evolutionary lineage separate from ours!
- scotty79 2y ago
  Maybe it's more like phoneme set.
- mseepgood 2y ago
  > This adds an insane order of magnitude to their language Do we assume they only have one language? We humans have thousands of languages.
- throwup238 2y ago
  What are the chances of us being able to decode some of that in our life time? There must be some meaning to it, even if it's not as complex as human speech. We should do it just to make sure they're not saying "so long and thanks for all the plankton."
  - emmelaich 2y ago
    Could be just like that classic Gary Larson canine decoder cartoon.[0] Could be more musical. I hope / fear it's something more sophisticated. [0] https://twitter.com/Andr6wMale/status/1501487704399298560/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Andr6wMale/status/1501487704399298560/ph...
  - yosito 2y ago
    > even if it's not as complex as human speech I wouldn't make that assumption. Just because whales don't have opposable thumbs and have a harder time making and using tools doesn't mean that their speech isn't advanced.
JohnMakin 2y ago
It always amazes me how science has historically tripped over itself to avoid calling what is clearly some sort of culturally defined communication as “language” when it comes to cetaceans. I think and suspect these animals are far more intelligent than we guessed, and the ethical ramifications of that reality would be difficult to swallow. Many species of toothed and baleen whales are under threat of extinction according to a lot of climate predictions.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  Climate isn’t the biggest risk to some species. Some orcas (which are technically dolphins) don’t have enough supply of the fish they eat. Issues like river and fishery management or dam removal or ocean overfishing don’t get enough attention, but would be important to fix even if climate wasn’t an issue.
  - mikrotikker 2y ago
    Maybe that's why they started attacking boats... Hitting the competition
  - micromacrofoot 2y ago
    fishing net entanglement is still the biggest problem for some nearly extinct species like the right whale
- bullfightonmars 2y ago
  I think the whole point/perspective of science is that claims have to be provable with evidence. Scientists don’t make claims without evidence. I am sure that there were a lot of preconceived biases that blocked scientific research from occurring in this space, but it might also be that we didn’t have the tools to examine evidence until recently. Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration, and absolutely want to prove the unproven or refute the previously proven with new evidence. It’s how they make their stamp in their field.
  - stult 2y ago
motohagiography 2y ago
what categories of concepts would they express to each other? maybe an identifier and some conditions like depth, water temperature or pressure, maybe some magnetic or gravitational field direction and locations, tides, topography, mating, food, distress, and then probably some concept of boats and types of boats.
- paulrudy 2y ago
  All of those options sound interesting and plausible, yet when I go for a walk while talking with a friend, I'm imagining an alien anthropologist wondering, "Are they communicating the ambient air temperature, and the availability of food nearby, their orientation to the sun and Venus setting?" Maybe the whales are gossiping, or sharing old stories, songs, jokes...
  - motohagiography 2y ago
    like the weather, restaurants, and plans for the summer, or even breeding opportunities? (will admit to missing the subtlety of the joke tho) maybe they're complaining about how the options on whale tinder are too blubbery, but he categories for living things to talk about are definitely shared, and dividing phenomena into them is pretty straightforward. the real risk might be that the next iteration of GPT simulates an always just out of reach imagined better option and whales stop reproducing in pursuit of it. we should try it on another species first.
    - paulrudy 2y ago
      Good point, yeah, generally the basic survival topics are still in play even when we're busy with finer details! Still, giving an intelligent species the credit for (perhaps) engaging in the final details seems like something generous to leave on the table! Like whale dating apps, exactly. Maybe the trees would show something useful to GTP
ralegh 2y ago
Interspecies communication is a massively underrated field. We've bridged human cultures in the past, which is easier because humans do similar (ish) things, we can use sight, touch, smell, etc to establish common ground. We can communicate simple things with pets, though in my experience they learn from body language and intonation, understanding grammar and language feels like a step further. What's the common ground with whales? Like how eskimos have 100 words for snow, whales could have thousands of phrases for water, currents, temperature, storms. Fish, migration of different species. A language of relative position needed for pack hunting. They might tell stories about El Niño, earthquakes, tsunamis. If they have social structure we may share ideas of relationships, friendship, giving (food), owing, sharing, helping, etc. We might be able to correlate their speech with weather patterns and animal sightings. We could probably start a two way communication, I wonder if us or them would have better forecasts for sea conditions. They could act as a network of hundreds of thousands of sensors. Sperm whales travel so far, that even without maps they might know the shape of the continents. Very excited for the future.
- yosito 2y ago
  I can understand why scientists, linguists, and whale enthusiasts might be interested in understanding whale communication. But I have a much harder time imagining that whales have much to say to humans other than, "Please kindly fuck off" in 99% of cases.
  - circlefavshape 2y ago
    I think finding out what they're saying about (rather than to) us would be amazing
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Dogs have a lot to say to humans. Most of it also applies to whales: "Feed me" "I'm hurt, help me" "I found the thing you wanted. How about a reward?" If you can solve the whale's problems, then it will have things to say to you.
    - 2y ago
DizzyDoo 2y ago
For anyone wanting a short piece of fiction about human-animal communication development, I enjoyed this one (or part one of one) from Lars Doucet: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/we-trade-with-ants-a-short-story-series/ https://www.fortressofdoors.com/we-trade-with-ants-a-short-s...
- mrec 2y ago
  For a blast from the past, Ursula Le Guin's The Author of the Acacia Seeds is also fun: https://xenoflesh.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ursula-k.-le-guin.pdf https://xenoflesh.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/u... (Note: PDF)
frellus 2y ago
"Gracie is pregnant"
hypertexthero 2y ago
Echoes Part II always makes me think of whales trying to talk to us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9Kts3fo98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9Kts3fo98

252 points by tintinnabula 2y ago

No mention of birdsong in this article leaves me hanging. Surely birdsong has got to be much more studied, and must contain lots of complexity ripe to be plumbed for hidden meaning.

BurningFrog 2y ago
AFAIK, pretty much all birdsong is telling other birds where you are and that either... 1. you want to mate! 2. you want others to stay away from your territory!
- hnbad 2y ago
  IIRC there have been studies and they showed differences in the latter depending on the specific threat. But "birds" is a large group and studying "bird songs" is not any more helpful than studying "mammal noises" and I don't recall which species the study looked into. It's worth remembering though that "language" is a form of communication and communication is vital in all social species. "Come here, I'm a good mate and available" and "Go away, I'm big and scary" are the lowest common denominator so even non-social species usually have some way of expressing those sentiments. But the more complex a species' social dynamics are, the more likely it is they will have means of communication capable of reflecting that. It's also a mistake to look at utterances (mouth sounds) in isolation, especially when looking at a communication system we're unfamiliar with. Body language and facial expressions are a big deal in human communication even if we sometimes exclude them from analysis for simplicity. Not to mention that language features may be different if only because of the different biology (e.g. overtones, repetition or rhythm might carry semantics). In other words, what Arrival did with alien "written language" equally applies to non-human "spoken language". It would be a mistake to assume that all the concepts we use for analyzing human language would apply to forms of communication in other animals even if another animal's language might turn out to be similarly complex.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/photoshop/6/0/1/150601.jpg?v=1 https://s3.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/photoshop/6/0/1/150601.j...

utensil4778 2y ago

I'm really excited to see where ML takes us in cetacean linguistic research. I don't know if it will successfully translate whale song, but we'll learn a whole lot by trying. Whale song is about the closest thing we have to an alien language. It's very much worth studying with all the tools we have. Besides that, the 12 year old in me just screams look at the size of their brains! There has to be something going on in there. I really want to know what they have to say!

stubish 2y ago
The smarter birds are easier to study. As are the great apes and dolphins. Research has been finding it isn't brain size so much as density and architecture of particular parts that leads to what we call 'intelligence', and I would assume what we could call a 'conversation'. Not that we shouldn't study whale songs, but that the scope is much larger than you indicated. We can communicate with gorillas with English words (but not English grammar last I heard?), but I'm not sure if we even know what noises and gestures gorillas make that are communication or are just them clearing their throats. But I've gone past studies working out the vocabularies of birds and meerkats.

jimwhite 2y ago

Here is the blog post from Project CETI that did the research https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/sperm-whale-phonetic-alphabet-proposed-for-the-first-time https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/sperm-whale-phonetic-... Ridiculous how many articles repeat the NYT'$ paywalled headline but don't report any sources.

spopejoy 2y ago
> Rhythm, tempo, rubato and ornamentation can be freely combined. This gives rise to a large inventory of distinguishable codas — a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” that makes it possible to systematically explain observed variability in coda structure. It's remarkable how musical analysis is at the forefront here as a central categorizing schema. There's remains a lot of mystery surrounding human neurology with respect to music, but it seems tha music travels different pathways than verbal communications, while still having "liguistic" features. Music might even have vestigial function for us that birdsong and whalesong are still maintaining.

hiergiltdiestfu 2y ago

Is this article's source available somewhere else, non-paywalled?

hiergiltdiestfu 2y ago
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

xico 2y ago

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28802 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28802

engineer_22 2y ago

Do whales have dialects or is it a global language

bradrn 2y ago

Paper link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8

vixen99 2y ago
Much appreciated
robxorb 2y ago
The chart on page 6 (of the PDF) is fascinating, kind of sums up the findings visually.

djtango 2y ago

Who knew that the sentient life we were looking for were beneath our feet in our deep blue oceans rather than up above the stars.

hatenberg 2y ago
Oh we knew. Hyperion covers this topic quite well.
- salomonk_mur 2y ago
  Douglas Adams had it right, as usual.
  - OnlyMortal 2y ago
    “So long and thanks for all the fish”
BobbyTables2 2y ago
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

WaxProlix 2y ago

Can we tokenize these signals? A ripe new market for LLM-based solutions may be opening up!

potatoman22 2y ago
From the article: “I’ve no doubt that you could produce a language model that could learn to produce sperm-whale-like sequences,” Dr. Rendell said. “But that’s all you get.”
gabesullice 2y ago
If we could (we probably can), we'd have a fluent LLM that would generate sounds that we still couldn't understand.
- pton_xd 2y ago
  Couldn't the LLM translate it to words that have similar embeddings in our own language? Translation is one of the tasks that LLMs excel at.
  - dotnet00 2y ago
    Don't you actually need manual translations to feed into the model first for that? AFAIK LLMs are not sci-fi-esque magic universal translators.
    - truculent 2y ago
      Not necessarily. For example: https://engineering.fb.com/2018/08/31/ai-research/unsupervised-machine-translation-a-novel-approach-to-provide-fast-accurate-translations-for-more-languages/ https://engineering.fb.com/2018/08/31/ai-research/unsupervis... > Training an MT model without access to any translation resources at training time (known as unsupervised translation) was the necessary next step. Research we are presenting at EMNLP 2018 outlines our recent accomplishments with that task. Our new approach provides a dramatic improvement over previous state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and is equivalent to supervised approaches trained with nearly 100,000 reference translations. To give some idea of the level of advancement, an improvement of 1 BLEU point (a common metric for judging the accuracy of MT) is considered a remarkable achievement in this field; our methods showed an improvement of more than 10 BLEU points. Although, this specific method does require the relative conceptual spacing of words to be similar between language; I don't see how that would be the case for Human <-> Whale languages.

ddon 2y ago

https://archive.is/7prpD https://archive.is/7prpD

garciasn 2y ago
Seems like the NYT found a way to fuck with archive.is. There’s a gigantic overlay blocking a ton of the content. Boo.
- aspenmayer 2y ago
  I found this via the topbar history nav on archive.is when visiting the original link you’re replying to: https://archive.is/vwQ4Z https://archive.is/vwQ4Z also available on Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20240507155229/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/science/whale-song-alphabet.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240507155229/https://www.nytim...
- Etheryte 2y ago
  It is an SVG loading indicator that's broken when embedded on the archive page, nothing to do with NYT trying to obfuscate archival tools.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    >nothing to do with NYT trying to obfuscate archival tools // How would you know? Seems pretty likely based on how companies try to enshitify the web.
    - Etheryte 2y ago
      Looking at the code, there is nothing malignant going on, it's simply a common CSS + SVG bug. Most people wouldn't know how to intentionally write this so that it breaks on one page, but works on the other. Occam's razor etc.
- cobbzilla 2y ago
  install uBlock Origin, block content element, it’s gone (until they change things to not match the selector anyway)

baerrie 2y ago

It is less like an alphabet, we already know that there is a discreet number of click clusters (basically an alphabet). Here they have found that the sperm whales modulate tempo of these clusters, rhythm within the clusters, add additional ornamental clicks, and change the rhythm of individual clicks within clusters over time (rubato). This adds an insane order of magnitude to their language much like our use of tone, context, and all the other ways we take our alphabet and enrich it with exponentially more meaning. This is the first time this has been proven in an evolutionary lineage separate from ours!

scotty79 2y ago
Maybe it's more like phoneme set.
mseepgood 2y ago
> This adds an insane order of magnitude to their language Do we assume they only have one language? We humans have thousands of languages.
throwup238 2y ago
What are the chances of us being able to decode some of that in our life time? There must be some meaning to it, even if it's not as complex as human speech. We should do it just to make sure they're not saying "so long and thanks for all the plankton."
- emmelaich 2y ago
  Could be just like that classic Gary Larson canine decoder cartoon.[0] Could be more musical. I hope / fear it's something more sophisticated. [0] https://twitter.com/Andr6wMale/status/1501487704399298560/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Andr6wMale/status/1501487704399298560/ph...
- yosito 2y ago
  > even if it's not as complex as human speech I wouldn't make that assumption. Just because whales don't have opposable thumbs and have a harder time making and using tools doesn't mean that their speech isn't advanced.

JohnMakin 2y ago

It always amazes me how science has historically tripped over itself to avoid calling what is clearly some sort of culturally defined communication as “language” when it comes to cetaceans. I think and suspect these animals are far more intelligent than we guessed, and the ethical ramifications of that reality would be difficult to swallow. Many species of toothed and baleen whales are under threat of extinction according to a lot of climate predictions.

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Climate isn’t the biggest risk to some species. Some orcas (which are technically dolphins) don’t have enough supply of the fish they eat. Issues like river and fishery management or dam removal or ocean overfishing don’t get enough attention, but would be important to fix even if climate wasn’t an issue.
- mikrotikker 2y ago
  Maybe that's why they started attacking boats... Hitting the competition
- micromacrofoot 2y ago
  fishing net entanglement is still the biggest problem for some nearly extinct species like the right whale
bullfightonmars 2y ago
I think the whole point/perspective of science is that claims have to be provable with evidence. Scientists don’t make claims without evidence. I am sure that there were a lot of preconceived biases that blocked scientific research from occurring in this space, but it might also be that we didn’t have the tools to examine evidence until recently. Scientists are generally very curious, open to exploration, and absolutely want to prove the unproven or refute the previously proven with new evidence. It’s how they make their stamp in their field.
- stult 2y ago

motohagiography 2y ago

what categories of concepts would they express to each other? maybe an identifier and some conditions like depth, water temperature or pressure, maybe some magnetic or gravitational field direction and locations, tides, topography, mating, food, distress, and then probably some concept of boats and types of boats.

paulrudy 2y ago
All of those options sound interesting and plausible, yet when I go for a walk while talking with a friend, I'm imagining an alien anthropologist wondering, "Are they communicating the ambient air temperature, and the availability of food nearby, their orientation to the sun and Venus setting?" Maybe the whales are gossiping, or sharing old stories, songs, jokes...
- motohagiography 2y ago
  like the weather, restaurants, and plans for the summer, or even breeding opportunities? (will admit to missing the subtlety of the joke tho) maybe they're complaining about how the options on whale tinder are too blubbery, but he categories for living things to talk about are definitely shared, and dividing phenomena into them is pretty straightforward. the real risk might be that the next iteration of GPT simulates an always just out of reach imagined better option and whales stop reproducing in pursuit of it. we should try it on another species first.
  - paulrudy 2y ago
    Good point, yeah, generally the basic survival topics are still in play even when we're busy with finer details! Still, giving an intelligent species the credit for (perhaps) engaging in the final details seems like something generous to leave on the table! Like whale dating apps, exactly. Maybe the trees would show something useful to GTP

ralegh 2y ago

Interspecies communication is a massively underrated field. We've bridged human cultures in the past, which is easier because humans do similar (ish) things, we can use sight, touch, smell, etc to establish common ground. We can communicate simple things with pets, though in my experience they learn from body language and intonation, understanding grammar and language feels like a step further. What's the common ground with whales? Like how eskimos have 100 words for snow, whales could have thousands of phrases for water, currents, temperature, storms. Fish, migration of different species. A language of relative position needed for pack hunting. They might tell stories about El Niño, earthquakes, tsunamis. If they have social structure we may share ideas of relationships, friendship, giving (food), owing, sharing, helping, etc. We might be able to correlate their speech with weather patterns and animal sightings. We could probably start a two way communication, I wonder if us or them would have better forecasts for sea conditions. They could act as a network of hundreds of thousands of sensors. Sperm whales travel so far, that even without maps they might know the shape of the continents. Very excited for the future.

yosito 2y ago
I can understand why scientists, linguists, and whale enthusiasts might be interested in understanding whale communication. But I have a much harder time imagining that whales have much to say to humans other than, "Please kindly fuck off" in 99% of cases.
- circlefavshape 2y ago
  I think finding out what they're saying about (rather than to) us would be amazing
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Dogs have a lot to say to humans. Most of it also applies to whales: "Feed me" "I'm hurt, help me" "I found the thing you wanted. How about a reward?" If you can solve the whale's problems, then it will have things to say to you.
  - 2y ago

DizzyDoo 2y ago

For anyone wanting a short piece of fiction about human-animal communication development, I enjoyed this one (or part one of one) from Lars Doucet: https://www.fortressofdoors.com/we-trade-with-ants-a-short-story-series/ https://www.fortressofdoors.com/we-trade-with-ants-a-short-s...

mrec 2y ago
For a blast from the past, Ursula Le Guin's The Author of the Acacia Seeds is also fun: https://xenoflesh.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ursula-k.-le-guin.pdf https://xenoflesh.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/u... (Note: PDF)

frellus 2y ago

"Gracie is pregnant"

hypertexthero 2y ago

Echoes Part II always makes me think of whales trying to talk to us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9Kts3fo98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW9Kts3fo98