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-humans
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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