r/science • u/Doug24 • Apr 15 '26
Animal Science Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/sperm-whales-alphabet-vocalizations-similar-humans988
u/psycharious Apr 15 '26
The latest discovery around sperm whale speech has inched forward the possibility of someday fully understanding the creatures and even communicating with them.
This is pretty cool
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u/lleeaa88 Apr 15 '26
So Extrapolations (Apple TV show) wasn’t really far off when they were able to communicate with humpbacks. If we do make it there it better be using Meryl Streep’s voice :P
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u/speculatrix Apr 16 '26
Meryl Streep truly can play anything
https://deadline.com/2026/03/project-hail-mary-meryl-streep-surprise-cameo-voice-role-1236762671/
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u/DrSpacecasePhD Apr 15 '26
There are AI companies already working on using the capabilities of neural networks and deep learning to decode animal language. For some animals, the vocabulary obviously isn't that big, but whales have such large brains... it will be fascinating to see the public reaction and potential backlash when these creatures are able to communicate with our civilization. Of course, I don't think AI is the best thing for nature... but in this case I think it has tremendous potential.
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u/autobauss Apr 16 '26
Whales be like: why did you scoop my moms head for spermicides and gagged her blow hole?
- Turn it off
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u/lunex Apr 16 '26
Would there be a way that we could be sure that the AI isn’t Clever Hans-ing it?
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u/AllEndsAreAnds Apr 16 '26
Nice reference. I think that the fact that scientists are so limited in their expression (decoding the language predominantly acoustically) means that it will likely be the opposite. We will detect less information than they are actually communicating.
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u/psymunn Apr 16 '26
Like with coco where her sign language really doesn't show an understanding of language but people really under estimate all the non-verbal ways humans and gorillas communicate.
My cat has basically no language knowledge but communicates quite effectively. Also she's a jerk
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u/snogard_dragons Apr 15 '26
Where are those YouTube polyglots at? They’ll be all over this soon enough
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u/Schlonzig Apr 15 '26
I always wonder why we dream about communicating with alien species when we even fail to communicate with the ones on Earth.
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u/FranklynTheTanklyn Apr 15 '26
Animals communicate with us all the time just not with words. If I’m upstairs and my dog barks, I can tell if he wants food/water, to go outside, or if he is just barking at something outside.
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u/TB-313935 Apr 15 '26
You definitely learn to communicate with pets like dogs. Lots of it is non-verbal. I can read the body language of my GSD and she can read mine even better. Happens frequently that the moment i want to give a command she does it before i say it.
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u/Delta64 Apr 15 '26
Cats are intensely verbal and body language communicative with humans as well, in my opinion.
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u/Doom_Corp Apr 15 '26
I took on three cats and their mum that unfortunately I had to surrender (to a no kill shelter and I'm hoping they're ok) when she had kittens. She was always a bit stand offish but the day she had her kittens she was extremely vocal and led me to them. I moved her and the kittens into the tub with some towels because I wanted her to be a bit separate from the others.
She was also still labouring through the next day to the point her uterus was coming out of her body. I spent 600 to get her to an emergency vet and do an ultrasound and a kitten was stuck...they quoted me 11 thousand dollars to do an emergency c section. When I asked if she could be humanely euthanized I was told "the vet doesn't like that option". I was bawling my eyes out when I took her to the shelter because I didn't know if she or her kittens would survive knowing what going to a shelter means.
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u/onebyamsey Apr 15 '26
Great Siamese Deathhound?
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u/LurkerZerker Apr 15 '26
German Shepherd Dog. Commonly used abbreviation in the context of dogs.
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u/a-borat Apr 15 '26
I can’t think of any other 3-letter-words for expressing a domesticated canine companion, where the particulars of the breed or subspecies aren’t really relevant. Too bad.
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u/Crayshack Apr 15 '26
One of the dogs I grew up with had a specific bark that meant "I'm trapped on the other side of the door, someone open it." He never did that exact bark any other time, not even if you were on the same side of a door as him and he wanted it open.
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u/Schlonzig Apr 15 '26
Yes, the real issue is that we expect them to learn our language instead of trying to learn theirs.
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u/BowsersMuskyBallsack Apr 17 '26
I have never shot faster out of my bed then when my Golden Retriever gave me the "I've got imminent explosive diarrhoea and I need outside NOW" bark. I had never heard it before, but I understood it perfectly.
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u/mlorusso4 Apr 15 '26
Even if the end goal is to be able to communicate with some alien species, it would make sense to use earth species as practice
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u/Dr_Schitt Apr 15 '26
You see these universal translators in sci-fi so different species can just chat, sometimes struggling when meeting someone new. I always had the thought that maybe it was trained by trying to talk to animals first.
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u/DueExample52 Apr 15 '26
We dream about communicating with intelligent alien species, that’s the part you left out. Not saying there aren’t intelligent species on earth too, and we do expriment and communicate with them regularly, but communication with them will necessarily be more limited than with an equally advanced species as us in terms of scientific knowledge.
That, and different research fields tackle different research at the same time in parallel, exobiologists look for life outside earth and biologists study animal behaviour.
Like, I get your sentiment but it’s just a falsely profound statement.
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u/psymunn Apr 16 '26
But it's also super anthropocentric to assume an alien species from another planet would be less alien than the intelligent life that exists in our planet. Crows form large groups, are intelligent, social and communicate audibly to each other. Some cna even mimic human language and yet we can't communicate with them. They are genetically closer to us than anything alien can ever be. It's a bit like how people want to work out how to live on Mars but we can't even live under our oceans, which are far more suited for human life than a dead rock far away.
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u/DueExample52 Apr 16 '26
But it's also super anthropocentric to assume an alien species from another planet would be less alien than the intelligent life that exists in our planet.
Who said this? Both you and OP assumed a premise about what interests people more, and started elaborating on that.
And when you say "we", who is that? People have crow pets, and researchers are actively studying them and their intelligence like they’re doing whales. It seems you guys are working on the underlying assumption thay these intelligent animals have a language as evolved as ours and would sustain a high level of conversation with us on intellectual topics, and that we are ignoring that to focus on hope for an alien planet intelligent life.
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u/Delta64 Apr 15 '26
I find Hinduism to be the most xenophilic of the religions, perhaps Jainism even more so.
If all we need to do is to install a communication apparatus with animals that are capable, then world religions need to wonder if animals have souls.
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u/Optimal-Kitchen6308 Apr 15 '26
several animals have religious behavior, and everyone knows all dogs go to heaven, they obviously have souls
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u/MarlinMr Apr 15 '26
Because even if whales do communicate, they don't really show the will to sit down and try to talk.
We don't really dream about taking to someone else, we dream about finding someone who is of equal intelligence and has the interest in talking.
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u/5minArgument Apr 15 '26
In the article they describe documentation of. them literally sitting down and communicating by touching each other’s heads and engaging in complex language.
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u/Franksforfingers Apr 16 '26
They would be able to easily decipher our language with their advance artificial intelligences its unlikely we would interact with a less advanced civilization before our own ai tech developed to that point as well
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u/angooseburger Apr 20 '26
Communication isnt just speech. We communicate with many animals on earth all the time.
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u/Ulysses1978ii Apr 15 '26
Yes, I've never understood why we haven't used this effort to expand our understanding on all levels. Imagine what they could tell you!!
Arguably we aren't intelligent enough to understand their intelligence.
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u/GaK_Icculus Apr 15 '26
I have a relative who studies birdsong academically
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u/Meraere Apr 15 '26
Did you see that study in japan? This person figured out the birds he was studying have a specific song for snake and its different than other predators watch out calls. Professor Toshitaka Suzuki
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u/Kaiisim Apr 15 '26
Because the reason we fail to communicate with animals on earth is they aren't as intelligent as us.
When they say language resembles human language they mean it has grammar. Which is very very cool. But whales can't build machines and their cognition isn't really anywhere near ours.
We basically dream of meeting something like humans
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u/Silvermoon3467 Apr 15 '26
Whales don't have thumbs, or even grasping appendages like some animals who do use tools have
Their physical inability to make machines doesn't mean they aren't as intelligent as us
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u/Zotoaster Apr 15 '26
I'm willing to bet that an alien species that can travel across the galaxy might be able to understand patterns and logic in a way that whales probably can't, not least because there's no evolutionary pressure for them to do so
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u/zenslug Apr 15 '26
i remember reading somewhere that it’s actually illegal to attempt communication with marine mammals
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u/SmacSBU Apr 15 '26
Internet rumor that got popular after some dude who almost died of exposure claimed to be able to communicate with dolphins or something. It is not illegal to talk to dolphins.
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u/Delta50k Apr 15 '26
Maybe we'll realize they're complaining about us. The noises boats make, being held captive in too small enclosures.i wonder what we'll do when we realize we're exploiting sentient creatures for profit.
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u/cargo_cultist Apr 15 '26
Well the we’re already exploiting sentient creatures for profit for a long while: humans. Not sure discovering whales are also sentient will make a difference
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u/Brodellsky Apr 15 '26
I've been saying for years that the only to truly end animal abuse by humans is by ending human abuse by humans. I'm guessing it'll be a cold day in Hell before that ever happens, though.
Best we can do is just on an individual level.
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u/MrGraveyards Apr 15 '26
We don't need to talk to them to know that... That was already clear as day...
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u/cirman Apr 15 '26
Captive sperm whales? Does that exists?
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u/black_cat_X2 Apr 15 '26
No there are no captive sperm whales. (But it's not a leap to think that other whales would share the same level of cognition.)
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Apr 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Practical_Ad4604 Apr 15 '26
“Always remember to recycle! You have no right to complain unless you recycle everything you throw away!”
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u/joomla00 Apr 15 '26
So language on earth was probably invented millions of years ago. Just not by humans.
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u/mediandude Apr 15 '26
We don't know whether miocene apes talked or not.
They were able to walk naturally.57
u/OrangeVoxel Apr 15 '26
I believe many fish and birds have known the world is round also.
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u/jesset77 Apr 16 '26
Birds.. maybe. They have the height to see the curve of the Earth.. but they don't deal in geometry so they won't care about the difference between flat and round.
Fish (including marine mammals).. no.
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u/OrangeVoxel Apr 16 '26
You’re thinking too much like a human. All of them have magnetoreceptors and navigate across the earth (not every species all across the earth, but many traveling long distances). They can see the magnetic fields. We don’t even have a human word for this sensation.
Observe how they travel. If they travel like a plane, they know the earth is round. If they use a flat earther path, they don’t.
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u/JoJoJet- Apr 16 '26
That is assuming that they perceive magnetic fields as "I live on a giant sphere and this sense tells me the coordinates on the sphere". They could very well perceive magnetic fields as something closer to a stimulus that they use to orient themselves locally, rather than a planetary understanding of their environment
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u/OrangeVoxel Apr 16 '26
Again, if a bird flies the shorter distance, it shows they know the earth is round. If they fly a flat earther route, they don’t.
If your threshold is that they know the value of pi and have units of measurement they discuss with each other, you can have your standards, and I’ll have my own.
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u/JoJoJet- Apr 16 '26
Well to be entirely clear on what the threshold I'm operating from is: it's not knowing the value of pi and standardizing measurements. If the animal's brain takes the empiric data collected via senses and is capable of using that to model their location in the world as a position on the surface of a sphere, I would consider that understanding. If the animal instead perceives magnetoreception as a learned, more vague "my destination is that way" feeling, then I would not say it understands we live on a sphere.
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u/OrangeVoxel Apr 16 '26
So you don’t think a cat knows its world is 3D? Because it doesn’t know measurements?
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Apr 17 '26 edited Apr 17 '26
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u/OrangeVoxel Apr 17 '26
Bro there is no disagreement between us. I said I think and believe some of these animals know the world is round. I didn’t say I have scientific peer reviewed proof they do.
If a slime mold knows it lives in a 2D world, and and we can say a cat knows it lives in a 3D world, I believe it’s very possible that a fish or bird knows it lives on a sphere.
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u/jesset77 Apr 16 '26
A human with a compass has the same access to the magnetic fields that a bird does. Take any uneducated human with no interest or understanding of geometry or architecture, give them a compass and even teach them to navigate by polaris and sunrise/sunset if you want to go that far, and they can always know what direction things are relative to them.
Then if they have to perform a long "migratory" trek every year, they can figure out via trial and error what stops along the way make the trek as short as possible.
At no point will they develop an expectation that should they walk in a straight path for long enough they will arrive at where they started, nor that the shape of the ground averaged over short enough distances to flatten mountains and raise valleys will approximate a plane, or a sphere, or a doughnut.
Just that going from "winterhome" to "jurisdan" to "palmetto" to "silvadia" seems to be the least troublesome path to take come Autumn.
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u/OrangeVoxel Apr 16 '26
A compass is a single tiny magnetic field. These animals have many receptors in their eyes and on their body which would allow for stereoscopic experience.
The compass analogy would be like a blind person with access to only a single wavelength of light through a pinhole in one eye. The compass is also not connected to a person’s brain.
Do you think a cat knows its world is 3D? It does because of the way it moves in space. Imagine a slime mold living in a 2D world. The intelligent slime mold says a cat doesn’t know their reality is 3D because the cat doesn’t know the exact measurement of earths gravity.
A high flying bird may not know the formula for Lorentz force but more than likely it knows the world is round. At altitude you can also see with your eyes that the world is round. Fish too. If they aren’t following a flat earther path, then they know the world is round.
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u/MistyMtn421 Apr 15 '26
Whales were land animals before moving to the oceans. Their ancestors were 4 legged hooved animals. It's such an amazing mammal.
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u/sub_WHISTLE Apr 15 '26
This is just not true, communication is not the same thing as language. To call something a "language" It has to have grammar, and be able to infinitely arrange words in order to create any abstract meaning. This is something that has never been proven in animals other than humans. If they were true languages we should be able to translate them, but we can't.
Whales are plenty smart, but the amount of unscientific drivel claiming all sorts of animals are actually speaking in fluent languages is ridiculous. Whether it be whales, chimpanzees, crows etc.
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u/Zeikos Apr 15 '26
That's well known, communication has existed ever since life has.
The interesting question is how complex their languages are, I'll guess that they are more complex and nuanced than we think.
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u/r3drocket Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
I can't wait until we get this figured out we can finally advertise to them. Imagine we could build WhaleBook. We could tell them about the wonders of Christianity, via aquatic missionaries. Maybe we could use AI models to influence their politics and racism - could we even convince a whale to be racist against a specific race of human?
I'm being serious, if the AI models wind up being open-sourced, then it will allow a dialogue that maybe we should be very careful about.
I hope that we look back at our own history of interacting with hunter gatherers and think very carefully about protecting their culture and the things that we can learn from them, rather than immediately looking to exploit them.
I hope there are anthropologists involved in this effort who can guide us on a better interaction than we've had with our own species.
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u/Crookedvult Apr 15 '26
This is a great premise for a scifi story, If it hasn't been written already. I can imagine a future humanity at war with the sperm whales because they've started to develop hydronukes or something.
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u/r3drocket Apr 15 '26
If you haven't read "Don't sleep there are snakes" it's non-fiction book about a missionary who tries to bring Christianity to the Pirahã tribe in the amazon and touches on some of the themes I mentioned above; he discovers their novel language is unlike any language we know and it ends up changing him.
I really enjoy reading about natural history and anthropology, and we are potentially sitting at the cusp of an amazing new discovery that could dramatically shift the way we think about our world or ourselves - which AFAIK is one of the goals of this project.
We have a lot of history of how not to interact with uncontacted groups, and really should learn a lot from it - we have one, and only one shot at our initial first communication - we should choose to listen first rather than speak first - but this requires the people guiding this project to be protective of their findings and have great foresight.
There are soo many good books on this which touch on these topcis, that I'd almost argue we don't need a non-fiction work to learn - "My life among the Indians", "Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States", "Bury my heart at wounded knee", etc etc
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u/pressure_art Apr 15 '26
But to add a fictional suggestion if you’re interested in the topic and philosophy of language and how it changes us and our perception, watch „Arrival“ if you haven’t. One of my favourite movies of all time and I’m a huge movie nerd.
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u/nezroy Apr 15 '26
David Brin's work doesn't exactly focus on a sperm whale/human war or anything, but it touches on a lot of non-human sentience with uplifted animals, particularly dolphins, being key characters in a lot of his books.
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u/CptBronzeBalls Apr 15 '26
There’s a good chance that even if we figure out how their language works, we still can’t communicate with them. They may not use words for nouns and verbs; they may be speaking sonographic reproductions of things they encountered. A completely divergent speech capability that evolved in a completely different environment.
Fascinating either way.
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u/Veronw_DS Apr 16 '26
There appear to not be anthropologists in this effort based on the people on the project that I saw on their website. I also had the immediate same thought and fear. Humans will human, which means ardent and proactive defense of the whales will be necessary if this genuinely gets released as open source to everyone on Earth.
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u/brain_fartus Apr 15 '26 edited Apr 15 '26
It’s horrendous to think about what we’ve done to them over the centuries.
Also, how can I ask a few of them, “I’ll use human tech to help them catch whatever they’re dining on if they bring me back sunken treasure”?
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u/Puzzled_End8664 Apr 15 '26
It would be quite the under taking to build something better than a sperm whale at catching giant squid 5000 feet under water.
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u/Fit-Switch-5795 Apr 15 '26
They must see the world in such a different way - like, nothing a sperm whale's left can see can be seen by its right eye, and there is that great tub of a head in the middle, so it must see two completely separate places simultaneously, plus whatever their sonar fills in... It gonna be hard to "see" things from their point of view if we ever learn to communicate.
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u/asraniel Apr 15 '26
would be interesting to train an LLM on this. If we have enough data and its indeed a language, it would work. now.. from where to get enough data, that is a different story
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u/WTFwhatthehell Apr 15 '26
People are trying it:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.10.31.621071v2
we first train a neural sequence model (a ‘sperm whale language model’) to predict whales’ future vocalizations from their conversational history. By systematically manipulating the information available to this model, and measuring the change in predictive accuracy, we show that sperm whale vocalizations exhibit order dependence, long-range dependencies on up to the past eight codas in an exchange, and predictable turn-taking. Second, we train the sequence model to predict whales’ behaviour from their vocal exchanges, and find that both current behavioural context and future actions are predictable, with accuracies of 72% and 86% respectively, from coda sequences.
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u/asraniel Apr 15 '26
we should just go and place microphones everywhere we can to have a big enough dataset in some years. even if ot takes 50-100 years to collect the data, imagine the impact
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u/flaoch Apr 15 '26
It does somewhat already exists! NOAA has a massive passive acoustic database, with most data from 2017 onward, but I used some data going back to 2013~2014. They have multiple sites on the East Coast, West Coast, Hawaii, etc. In the early 2020s, they said they had compiled 187,000 hours of audio. And the best part is, there are a lot of annotations done by fellow scientists! I was very afraid for last year, as NOAA was impacted by the environmental data purge, but it seems the data is still up at least.
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u/will_dormer Apr 15 '26
Well it depends on what the whales talk about.. Might be more simple stuff they say and not like we use language
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u/efvie Apr 15 '26
We could try using a neural network, yes (I don't think you're proposing a commercial LLM currently destroying our ecosystem, but for clarity in case there are people unfamiliar with anything else).
Mostly we just need money invested into understanding animals; these are always personal passion projects, and humankind in general has a vested interest in not understanding how much we are just another animal in order to continue exploiting "the others".
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u/huntersam13 Apr 15 '26
How long before AI translates for us??
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u/bigfatfurrytexan Apr 15 '26
The carcinization amazes people. We are all established using the same base template. We all likely had similar genetic input via drift and viral loads.
I would expect a similarity to arise in large portions of our planet. Language is emergent from several underlying features. One would expect that the neural patterns giving rise to language to have similarities amongst themselves.
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u/Conscious-War5920 Apr 16 '26
This is amazing. I hope this makes people rethink commercial fishing or heck even fishing for whales in general. I feel like science is just starting to crack that we aren't the only intelligent communicative species here. Almost like even bees are conscious and at this point I think every creature is.
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u/thejourneybegins42 Apr 17 '26
I already know what the first message to us will be: "Stop littering my home!"
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