Scientists claim they had their first one-on-one conversation with a whale.
A team from the SETI Institute and the University of California had an "exchange" with a 38-year-old humpback whale named Twain off the coast of Alaska.
They used underwater microphones to send whale calls, "whup/throp" sounds, and received 36 responses that seemed to indicate that Twin was actively engaged in an exchange.
An AI algorithm analyzes these responses, revealing that Twin may have shared a greeting call with a team on a ship in the Pacific Ocean.
While communicating with different species in this way has never been possible, researchers use this experience in the hope of one day being able to have a dialogue with extraterrestrial creatures.
In the absence of aliens, researchers hope to use whales to develop non-human communication strategies.
Humpback whales make great alien alternatives because of their extremely high intelligence and communication skills.
"Humpback whales are very complex to socialize," lead study author Brenda McCorwin told UC Davis. "They travel vast distances and have a huge sound library. I always say that humpback whales make every sound in nature. The diversity of sounds they produce is incredible. ”
The team found a twen and a pod of humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean and decided that this was the best place to deploy an underwater microphone.
Twin left the pod and joined the team's vessel, allowing researchers to capture the first one-on-one conversation with humpback whales while still hearing the pod's chit-chat as they forage.
Although some of the sounds whales make may be social noise, researchers believe they may be giving commands, such as telling each other to move up and down.
For example, the team suggested that humpback whales might be telling each other to "blow the net deeper" and might even say "you idiot" in response to an emotional response.
The team told UC Davis that when they first lowered their underwater microphones, they didn't hear anything, but they weren't worried because the humpback whales had traveled thousands of miles from Hawaii and were foraging.
They searched until they found a group of whales that were communicating with each other and tried to record their voices again.
The next day, the researchers put speakers and recording equipment into the water and played the previous day's recording as a whale approached the boat.
After three attempts before Twyn responds to the call, after which each response gets stronger, McCorwin tries to match the whale's response pitch and then adjusts her response time to match the recording.
Researchers recorded and analyzed the sounds made by whales by using advanced underwater recording equipment (underwater microphones) and artificial intelligence algorithms to create underwater communication technology.
The AI is trained using data from humpback whale calls and human language to look for patterns and language structures.
Researchers say Twin's continued response to the recording may have originated from the previous day's recording, as researchers discovered that the whale had been part of that whale pack.
"This particular call could be very compelling to her, probably because she... It was a member of the whale team who made the call, or maybe even her own call," McCorwin told UC Davis, adding, "We don't know."
But it was a call she was somehow familiar with. Maybe that's why she responded to it so directly and stayed with us for 20 minutes. ”
In the research paper, the team suggested that Twin's response may have been driven by "excitement and possibly the beginning of anxiety."
When researchers accidentally spotted the group of whales in Alaska, Twen began circling the boat as they played the recorded humpback whale sounds.
Six researchers at the SETI Institute aim to understand how humpback whales communicate, hoping it will help them connect with aliens.
"Due to the limitations of current technology, an important assumption in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making connections and therefore target human recipients," said Dr. Lawrence Doyle of the SETI Institute, who is a co-author of the paper.
"This important hypothesis is clearly supported by humpback whale behavior," she added.
"To the best of our knowledge, this is probably the most complex acoustic communication with baleen whales to date," Fred Sharp, one of the paper's co-authors, told UC Davis. And this way of communicating, in fact, this dynamic replay opens up further possibilities. ”