Deep dive: What we are learning from the language of whales | James Nestor | TEDxMarin

The book, “Mind in the Waters” has wonderful stories about cetaceans. My favorite bit of info about them is that when humpback whales go to Hawaii to give birth, they sing very long songs. Scientists have determined that they sing the same long song every year, with a new addition at the end each year. It’s like they’re teaching their history to their young and adding a new chapter each year. Fascinating!

I am Japanese and I really hate and shame that my country still let people hunt whales and dolphins!!! I love the ocean mammals and we definitely need to stop the people killing them...!!!!!!!! I am so sorry...

I spent months hearing cetaceans on sonar watch on a submarine in the U.S. Navy. It almost seemed like you could hear the emotion in their squeaking and whining that occurred during the clicks and pops... I've heard them follow us as though they were playing also when a bottom sounding research vessel used active sonar forcing the Cetaceans to swim away with sounds of fear and pain... These creatures are truly incredible!

READ HIS BOOK! He goes in to such great detail about these whales and their language there and also alot more about the dolphins aswell, and about freediving. Super interesting! It's called "Deep: Freediving, Renegade Science, and What the Ocean Tells Us about Ourselves"

I am Faroese, and we hunt pilot whales. This really makes me question our tradition. Thank you for broadening my view of whales.

Humanity won't be able to deal with the guilt it's about to face when we learn the extent of what we've done to other sentient beings of this planet.

this is one of the most important TED talks I have ever watched

I’ve been fortunate enough to swim with these magnificent animals in Dominica, a memory that will remain with me forever. Priceless....

This is like the Arrival movie but with more purpose

Killer closing line, kudos to James Nestor. We are not the only intelligent species on our planet.

They're probably like, "what are these little skinny baby whales doing out here all alone?" I hope we get to know them before we lose them. I think it would be really interesting to see parallels and differences between communities outside our species with intelligence that equals our own.

Oh please let this project work, and may grants and funding flow!

This project is the reason I still believe in humanity. I love whales with my entire heart! These beautiful mammals need to be save.

Is there any update on his work? He mentions using the next two years to try and crack the code and now this video is 4 years old and I’m dying to see a sequel!

You need a pod with a newborn. That way you can hear the other whales say "Hi" and get introduced. Maybe it can be mimiced. What better way than focusing on a newborn whale that's learning its own language?

The man makes an incredible point at the end... here we are as a society searching the universe for intelligent life, when we completely turn a blind eye to the intelligent life in our own backyard

I like to imagine the whales are saying "friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend? friend?"

If you stop the video at 2:28, you can see the standing waves inside the spermacetti organ produce the horizontal bars, with a SPECIFIC vertical spacing, which is the identifier for each animal, due to the geometry of the organ. The vertical spacing would be absolutely unique for each whale, like a fingerprint. After the horizontal startup tones, the clicks start, and these are echo location. I'm assuming the picture is a spectrogram, with frequency on the Y axis, higher frequency on top, and the X axis is time, of one minute, showing a full communication cycle. A lot of the click modulation is coming from the pressure waves of the right nostril passage, below the entire spermacetti organ, causing it to vibrate with lateral standing waves. This is what causes the frequency modulation of the previously smooth horizontal frequency tones. The frequency modulation is very complex, since each front-to-back acoustic standing wave is being interfered with, by several up-and-down standing waves, caused by the vibration from the bottom side of the spermacetti organ. This modulation happens because the right nostril is a flat bladder under the entire width of the spermacetti organ. So, that is how the physical tone modulation is done, and that physical setup would make it easy to repeat, identically each time. So, what is the information content? The start is unmodulated, so that is saying "Hello, it's me". The modulated part of the left burst (the clicking) is mostly echo location. I count 24 high frequency clicks, which have most of the energy, which makes sense, as the higher frequencies will give better sonar resolution, when the echo bounces back. I think the real information of the message is the center part, where the tall frequency bands look somewhat like human speech on an oscilloscope. That is where the software could correlate with the actions of the whale who is speaking. Obviously, it is a blend of amplitude modulation, and frequency modulation. They could pack a LOT of information in a few seconds of that, since they are speaking in multiple tones, at the same time, compared to sequential human speech in one tone. Finally, the horizontal bars on the right side of the spectrogram are saying: "OK, that is what I had to say, someone else can talk now, this was me talking, I'm done now". So, the center of the spectrogram is the "speech" part, the horizontal bands on the left and right are formatting/Identification/echo location, and probably some political stuff, like "I'm dominant", etc. The formatting is like any computer language, where there is a protocol, with a header, main body that contains the message, and the end marker. You can see where the speech ends, the diagonals are like a person trailing off... "we'll that about does it for me, I'm done now"... that type of thing, like a slide whistle, an easy marker to listen for, so you don't interrupt someone while they are still speaking. The cool part would be seeing the slide whistle stop and go back down, and they would be saying "one more thing, I almost forgot to mention"... So, the center of the message is the juicy part, and probably each pod has their own dialect, with distant populations not able to understand each other. Best of luck with this research, it is so badly needed! ALL whale species must be saved from extinction, and brought back to their pre-industrial populations. I think Japan will be wiped off the map, by the planet, herself, for the horrific sin of killing these intelligent beings, who are probably far superior to us in every way.

"...it will be harder to kill an animal that can speak it's name." Have you seen what humans do to each other?

My heart breaks when I think of what we have done to these magnificent animals.