Photo Illustration by Kelly Caminero / The Daily Beast / Getty
They live in multicultural, matriarchal societies. Their 18-pound brains have neocortexes and spindle cells for higher-order thinking, emotions, memory, language, and love. They could be the most intelligent beings on this planet. We’re talking about sperm whales. And by the way, they don’t just make whale sounds: They speak.
According to City University of New York biological oceanographer David Gruber, sperm whale vocalizations aren’t your typical harmonious whale songs. Their phrases—series of Morse Code-like clicks called codas—sound more like a door slowly creaking open and shut on the deck of a sunken boat. But when researchers really started listening, they found that these codas carry all the hallmarks of a highly evolved language, even regional dialects, passed down generation to generation. In fact, Gruber has said he believes sperm whale speak to be “perhaps the most sophisticated form of communication that has ever existed.”
In 2021, Gruber officially launched the CETI Project (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a global interdisciplinary collaboration devoted to cracking the code on interspecies interpretation and communication, starting with the resident population of sperm whales in Dominica, in the Eastern Caribbean. The list of partner institutions includes the Dominica government, and about 50 cryptographers, linguists, technologists, and biologists who are heavyweights in their own fields. There’s natural language processing expert Michael Bronstein from Oxford University, Harvard University roboticists who specialize in extremely gentle technology for humane animal research, and Roger Payne—the American biologist who, 56 years ago, discovered for the first time that humpback whales sing, sparking the marine conservation movement. Tech superpowers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft are on board, too.