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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 many as 1,000 of the whales, accompanied by their newborn calves, frequented the surrounding bay. Belugas’ ceaseless chatter, made 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 says.
“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.”
Ever since the earliest known recording of whale song was made in 1949, researchers have been captivated by the wails, rumbles, clicks, grunts and squeals of their communication.
Sound is the fabric of these creatures’ highly sociable lives: they sing in breeding grounds, chatter in groups during birth, and echo-locate to help each other find food. Individual species have dozens of distinctive dialects, and the structural makeup of their communication shows parallels with human speech. Whales also 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?
The beauty of acoustic data is that it is a relatively easy way to gather information about 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, who 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 begin to be proficient at the beluga repertoire. They are clumsy initially. They play with sound – they babble, very much like human toddlers,” Vergara says.
One of the first sounds they perfect is an “acoustic name tag” to identify themselves, she explains. But her more recent work has revealed 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 get separated from their mothers in large 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 meeting grounds to boats, allowing the “faint, tentative, underdeveloped calls of little calves” to be heard, Vergara says. 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 also 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 found 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.
The goal is to inform more targeted conservation measures that go beyond “a blanket statement that [shipping] noise is bad, but to say noise interferes with their ability to share food, or [coordinate their hunts] over larger areas,” Vergara says.
It was once a controversial idea that whales have unique behaviours, such as dialects, shared socially within groups, because that is the definition of culture, previously seen as the preserve of humans alone.
Now it is accepted that many 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,” says Dr Ellen Garland, a researcher at St Andrews University in Scotland, who 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 about 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, which 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 across the entire South Pacific.
“Within a season, [a population will] literally throw what they have out the window and rapidly learn this completely new song from their neighbours,” Garland says. “It’s like abandoning your national anthem for something your neighbour is singing.”
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 says. “So we have to draw analogies with human pop music, with human fashion.”
These “cultural waves” are becoming important for conservation. Because whale dialects are associated with other unique behaviour, they can be used to identify whale populations whose habits might make them more vulnerable to environmental threats.
One of the first case studies for incorporating animals’ cultural knowledge into conservation decisions involved sperm whales, says 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. Several codas are common across sperm whale groups or “clans”. But Hersh and the rest of a large international team of researchers discovered that individual clans in the Pacific also have one preferred coda, so effective at distinguishing individual populations that she calls it their “identity coda”.
Why sperm whales use these is still a mystery. “Our best guess is that it reinforces their bond,” she says, 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 says.
“Cultural insights, which for sperm whales most easily come from dialects, can be really helpful for doing that.”
Beyond conservation, Hersh likes to be immersed in the sperm whales’ auditory landscape, because it lets her consider the world from the perspective of these animals she admires.
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 says. “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 revealed that sperm whales use 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 also 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.
The findings could add up to something profound, he believes. “I think this research is reframing how we think of language,” he says, “and how we can extend it to some species.”
This is a controversial idea among cetacean researchers, with several 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 about how whales interact could help us to improve their protection.
The definition of language has long been a legal barrier between those who do and do not have rights, Beguš says. “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 says, 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 says 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 important?”
Instead of aiding our understanding, she thinks that “blinds us to discoveries that might be really interesting because of how much they differ from humans”.
Recalling the cacophony of beluga chatter that day in the tent, the question on her mind was not what they would say to us, but how their tapestry of trills and squeals enabled them to survive in their vast underwater world – and what that in turn could reveal about how we can help protect them. “It was such a moment of clarity,” she says.
