Brooke Gladstone: Welcome to On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. Just for a moment, let's turn our attention away from the crackling media and direct it thousands of feet beneath the ocean surface where even submarines can't venture. You might think it would be as silent as a tomb down there, but it's not.

[whale sounds]

Brooke Gladstone: What you are hearing is a conversation of sorts between multiple sperm whales off the coast of Dominica in the East Caribbean Sea.

Shane Gero: These are animals that spend most of their life in the darkness of the deep ocean and only a few minutes at the surface at any one time before diving back down.

Brooke Gladstone: Shane Gero is the lead biologist at CETI or the Cetacean Translation Initiative. He's been studying sperm whales and their endangered way of life for two decades.

Shane Gero: They have the largest brain that may exist ever depending on what we find outside of our universe. They're the size of a school bus, maybe even as long as two school buses, and weigh as much as 10 of them. They're fundamentally having a different experience of the world than we are as advanced primates running around on Earth.

Brooke Gladstone: Maybe not quite so different after all. After years of analyzing thousands of recordings of sperm whales clicking away at each other, Shane and his team at CETI discovered in May that they use a phonetic alphabet just like we do. It's composed of a string of clicks grouped into over 150 codas. This discovery, says Shane, might be the first of many steps that could lead to actually translating what these sea giants are saying and saving their lives.

Shane Gero: Families of sperm whales use dozens and dozens of these different types of codas. What this paper shows is four different building blocks that the sperm whales can use and mix together in various different combinations to make the codas that we hear and record in conversation. They can change the rhythm of the codas of the clicks, so it can be [whale sounds] or it can be [whale sounds] or it can change the duration. You can have the same rhythm [whale sounds], but it could be faster [whale sounds]. That keeps rhythm but varies the tempo and we call that rubato.

Brooke Gladstone: Which is a musical term.

Shane Gero: Yes, for variation in the duration of a note.

Brooke Gladstone: There's also something called ornamentation.

Shane Gero: That's right. When we looked at these conversations across time, we noticed that some of the time there's an extra click. Animals will be exchanging a series of four-click codas, and then suddenly there's a five-click one, and then there's more four-click ones again.

Brooke Gladstone: How do you know this stuff isn't random? How do you know that there's information being conveyed or a feeling or anything?

Shane Gero: Before we start asking why are these animals talking to each other, what might they be saying, we first need to understand the structure that exists in their conversations. What are the minimally smallest pieces of sound that the animals can combine together to make bigger pieces of sound that they then exchange in long conversations? That's similar to how humans work and that's where this idea of a phonetic alphabet comes from. We have phonemes that in this case are meaningless. In human language, they combine together to make words which carry meaning, and then the words are exchanged in long sequences that we call conversations.

That pattern matches what we see in the sperm whale. Before we start asking what each of the codas might mean, we need to have an understanding of all of the potential structure that might vary. Now we've greatly expanded in this study, the potential expressivity, the structures that we know might vary. We can start linking that to, do they make ornaments when they take turns in conversation? Do they make ornaments when they start foraging dives? It's important that we don't just look at the sounds that come out in series from a given animal across any context.

The context is really important; what they're doing, when they're doing it, and who they're doing it with. Then that gets to the really interesting one that has a lot of people excited, which is why are they talking to each other, what is the information that they might be conveying, but you need to construct that in that order. You can't just jump to the end.

Brooke Gladstone: I was fascinated to learn that there are actual dialects among sperm whales that you've been working all these past few decades in the East Caribbean. They have codas that other populations far away don't have.

Shane Gero: That's right. A given family of sperm whales in the Caribbean is about seven animals. Young males and females live with their family, and then when the males reach their early teenage years, they'll get socially ostracized out of the family. They go from living this hyper, social lives as young animals to living mostly solitary lives as adults, but the females; the grandmothers, the mothers, and daughters will live together for life. Any given family might make dozens of different rhythms that we call coda types. Sperm whale society is multi-tiered.

At the base you have families, but over the course of our research in Dominica, we've studied nearly 50 different families, and some of them share the same sets of codas, the same dialect, and all the families that speak the same dialect belong to the same clan. They'll have different habitat use and movement patterns and diet and social behavior. That's the cultural boundary. That's the, "I am Dominica, are you?" Rather than, "I am the Gulf of Mexico or the Mediterranean?"

Brooke Gladstone: That's fascinating.

Shane Gero: That clan group, they might get up to tens of thousands of animals and span tens of thousands of kilometers across an ocean. This boundary between us and them at that level only exists in these whales outside of humans. Part of that is because you would expect for it to be true also in primates or in elephants, these large brain, highly mobile animals,but unfortunately, because of habitat degradation, a chimpanzee that lives in Gombe, where Jane Goodall did all her work, is going to know all the chimps that live in Gombe as individuals as Bob and Sally and Brooke and Candace and Shane, and not, "I am Gombe."

Because a chimpanzee from Gombe is never going to meet a chimpanzee from Thai forest. The idea of a cultural boundary, a passport that says, "I am Canadian" is irrelevant if you already know me personally as Shane, but in the ocean where there aren't these boundaries, where these animals are traveling thousands of kilometers potentially, they're meeting strangers, and defining that us and them becomes really, really important. In the Caribbean, we record this unique coda called the one plus one plus three and it sounds like this [whale sounds]. That's unique to the families that live in the Caribbean.

There does seem to be this recognition of, "I am Canadian." My point being that there is this larger than my kin, larger than my family, larger than the animals I know personally as a structure in our populations.

Brooke Gladstone: I was able to tell that you were of the Canadian clan just by listening to you for five minutes. [laughs]

Shane Gero: Was my "about" really strong? Well, but that's great, right?

Brooke Gladstone: Yes.

Shane Gero: That brings up a really interesting idea, which is, is that one plus one plus three that we use to characterize these animals that live in the Caribbean, is that the same as, "I am from the United States" and "I am from the UK" or is that just the difference between truck and lorry?

Brooke Gladstone: Right. Interesting.

Shane Gero: That gets really, really interesting.

Brooke Gladstone: Right. Is there a way in which this phonetic alphabet is reminiscent of human language?

Shane Gero: Structurally, in many, many, many ways. That's structure of having small pieces that can be freely combined in various different ways to create larger units that are then exchanged in conversation. That pattern is mirrored in human languages.

Brooke Gladstone: There are skeptics that I've read of some of the conclusions that may have been drawn prematurely from your research. They say that maybe there isn't specific information, that maybe this is just music, a way to feel connected to other members of the clan without actually saying, "Would you pick up a carton of eggs when you go out to the grocery store?"

Shane Gero: It's very fair to make scientific arguments about the conclusions in our paper. I think what's really, really exciting about this is that we don't know either way. [chuckles] There are these projects like Project CETI that are saying, "What we're going to do is spend a lot of time listening to something fundamentally different from us and try and take away what lessons we can learn about what's special about human language, what's amazing about sperm whale communication, but also just what are fundamental similarities between the whale experience of the world and the human experience of the world."

Brooke Gladstone: This is the part that I'm so fascinated by. I am a science fiction fanatic. I really am interested in all the various forms of early humans and how they might be similar or different in how they see the world. I'm interested in the mental processes of octopuses just because the idea of seeing the world so differently, the idea of an intelligence that might be possible to communicate with one day that sees the world so differently. Obviously, your research team at CETI, which stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative is a play on S-E-T-I, SETI, the famous project to search for extraterrestrial intelligence life.

Your team talks about using AI to build sentences out of codas and maybe even playing them back to the whales. What's the ultimate goal of your CETI? To translate what they're saying and eventually talk back to them?

Shane Gero: In order to be able to conceptualize what it might mean to speak back to the whales, we first need to spend a huge amount of time listening and learning from them. I think what's been fascinating for me in studying sperm whales is that, despite the fact that they live in part of the world that our submarines find difficult to explore, the fact that they're the size of a school bus and live mostly in darkness. These fundamental similarities that come out of the science that we do is that where I come from defines who I become. That cultural diversity is important. Learn from your grandmother because she's probably done it before.

Brooke Gladstone: Ooh, stop with that because the role of grandparents was super interesting to me because we know in the studies of early man that the grandmother effect for the survival of the species was long underrated, and is now acknowledged as an important part of why we thrived as humans.

Shane Gero: Sure. I think if the citation show us anything, it's the power of strong female leadership, whether that's a killer whale grandmother or a sperm whale grandmother. We had the great honor of being there for when rounder in family A gave birth last summer and she was there with her mother and the grandmother of the new baby, as well as all her cousins and aunties, and even one of the young males who had started to leave. These are very strong families, because fundamentally in the vastness of the deep ocean where it's dark all the time, the only consistent thing is your family.

When I say that, it's not the two-way conversation between whale and human that drives the science that we're doing. What I mean by that is despite these fundamental differences, the mission of learning from someone fundamentally different from us still has yielded such strong lessons about ourselves. It's not about wanting to interact with a whale to change its behavior. It's about understanding what's important to a whale, and then asking how does that affect what I do? One of the questions we often get is like, well, if you learn a warning call, do you think you could just play it out in front of all the boats to make sure that no whale ever gets hit by a boat again? I think that reverses the understanding.

It does a disservice to what I think is the most important takeaway from this kind of work. Fundamentally, if we understand that, and we do now to some extent, that there's a crisis of these animals interacting with ships, but also the noise that's created. The solution to that isn't by putting more noise into the ocean. Even if it carries meaning that the animals may be able to interpret, what it means is that we need to learn how to change our behavior in order to protect what's important to them. That's the bigger vision here beyond the science

Brooke Gladstone: Now CETI's research on the language of sperm whales is deeply intertwined with the movement to protect and to preserve whales, and so we can't really talk about that without referencing the late Roger Payne who discovered that humpback whales sing. How did the general public perceive whales before Payne's research?

Shane Gero: It fundamentally changed the way people thought about whales and maybe even all of wildlife. When he discovered humpback whale song [whale sounds] and shared that with the world and it got put onto a golden record that we then shot off outside of our solar system, we were still actively killing whales by the thousands for dog food, grease, and oil. We had long passed their economic importance in terms of powering the economy of the world. They were still publishing papers about here's how we do science literally without killing them in the title. This came about at a time where our relationships to whales were pretty tragic.

What it did was inspired people to realize how amazing these animals truly are. I think National Geographic produced two or three floppy records ever. One is the Moon landing audio, and then the other is the humpback whale song. It ignited one of the largest environmental movements of our time, certainly until the climate change action that we're seeing in the recent years, and that's just because people stopped and heard whales.

Brooke Gladstone: The songs of the Humpback Whale is the best-selling nature sound record of all time. You say it triggered all this new age music. The songs were featured on Star Trek.

TV clip: I think I have it, sir.

[whale sounds]

TV clip: This is what it would sound like underwater.

Actor 1: Yes, sir.

[whale sounds]

Shane Gero: Which is great for our sci-fi fans, but it also brought about real impact in the world. In some ways it triggered the process that led to the Marine Mammal Protection Act and ending whaling globally and the moratorium at the IWC, which is the International Whaling Commission. These were all part of this large movement that happened across 10 years or more even from the onset of this humpback whale song discovery, and that's just from people hearing the song. It's exciting to imagine what might happen when we start understanding what the whales might be seeing.

Brooke Gladstone: You're hoping that it could have a similar impact because we may not be actively whaling, but they are still killed as a result of the loss of habitat and encounters with boats and so forth.

Shane Gero: They're getting hit by ships or entangled in fishing gear, or displaced by habitat destruction. Whales are facing threats that are mostly human-driven despite us not trying to kill them anymore. Having spent thousands of hours in the company of these families, I feel the burden of these animals trust in order to promote action towards their conservation. I think we have a big success story in that just this year when the government of Dominica announced that they're establishing a whale reserve which will manage shipping and fishing conflicts.

Brooke Gladstone: You were talking about the family that you've been watching since 2005 in the Eastern Caribbean Sea.

Shane Gero: Yes.

Brooke Gladstone: Tell me the story of one whale in particular, a calf named Digit. What happened to her? What was the impact of that?

Shane Gero: Digit holds a special place in my heart. Digit's family, which we called the Group of Seven, I've spent more time with than any other family. When I first met Digit's mom, Fingers, in 2005, she had--

Brooke Gladstone: So identified because of something on her fins?

Shane Gero: Yes. We recognized these individuals by taking pictures of their flukes, their tails as they lift them out of the water in that quintessential whale watching moment. Fingers had two notches that made it look like she was giving the peace sign on the right side of her fluke. Digit was born to Fingers in 2011, and Digit was a big deal because she was a female. In her family before that, there had been Enigma and Tweak and Thumb, but they were all males. They were expected to grow up and leave their family.

If these small sperm whale families are going to perpetuate themselves, they need to raise strong female daughters and imbue them with the cultural secrets of how to survive in the ocean that they live in. It was very exciting because what was happening across this period of time was that the older females were dying, and the young calves weren't surviving to replace them. Fingers and Digit were superstars for the future of the sperm whales that live in Dominica. Then about three years later, Digit was entangled in leftover fishing gear.

Brooke Gladstone: When did that happen? What year?

Shane Gero: Just before Christmas, 2014. This is an animal that's barely three years old. This is an animal that had just started making fluke cup dives, this is an animal that had just pretty much stopped nursing from her mom, and now is towing this piece of plastic rope around with her. Everything we know about entanglement is that the outcomes are never good. Often these are long-term chronic, slow deaths. Some animals even grow into the rope so much that that's what kills them. These are very tragic and horrible ways for these animals to die.

It was complete heartbreak, not just because she was the future of her family but also because we had been following her life and learned so much about what it means to grow up a sperm whale from Digit. She dragged this rope for nearly three years and she got skinny and we could see her spine through her back and got really emaciated. She started nursing again from fingers. What was amazing is we got that story out through our partners at National Geographic and just told the story of what was happening to Digit mostly because these are the kinds of things that happen, not intentionally.

No one wanted to tie digit up, but it came with a good story to end because miraculously, she was freed of her rope. She's gone on to grow up and start diving again and she is now the eldest young female in her family. She has new young cousins that she babysits. This family now has rebounded from this major crisis that was mostly driven by our involvement in their ocean home. What was amazing through that process, and it shifted, in many respects, my career too because people started coming on the whale watches, and they were coming out on the boats and yelling to our research boat, "Hey, Shane, how do we save Digit?" Not only know who Digit is, but they know she's at risk.

Sometimes the story about the science is equally as important as getting the science out, especially when it comes to conservation because as much as we think of it as save the whales, it's really about changing people's perspectives and behavior because we can't ask Digit to change the way she lives, but we can change the way that we interact with the ocean to limit the likelihood that we entangle another baby like Digit.

Brooke Gladstone: Obviously, for Save The Whales, it began with the music, the songs. Summarize, given what you've learned, the ingredients for a successful conservation movement. A jarring image, a particularly arresting factoid, simply the identification of individuals. What has worked in the history of conservation?

Shane Gero: There's a very famous viral video about a plastic straw inside a sea turtle's nose and these people pulling it out and trying to save the turtle. It resonated with a lot of people because this straw was something they see every day and that they could make that change easily. If I'm angry about this video, I can stop using plastic straws. That triggered this massive anti-plastic movement. The narrative of it's either our planet or we get plastic and those two things are hard to have together.

Yes, sometimes one picture or one fact or one sound can make a huge change in how humans interact with the ocean or wildlife, but in my experience, the most effective narrative about all of this is, first of all, to have scientists that, not only ask what's going on out there in the world but ask the second question, which is, well, what are we going to do about it? How do we engage people to care about the same things that we care about? So far for me, that has been in finding these deep similarities between whale's experience of the world and our experience of the world.

That's where things like be a good neighbor and learn from the everyday solutions to everyday problems from people that are fundamentally different from you. This idea that cultural diversity is important to us, both in our societies and also in the ecosystem, clearly. That's because it resonates with people. I care who my grandmother is. I like to be a good neighbor. I hold deeply where I come from in terms of my background and my ethnicity, and it's amazing for people to realize that those things fundamentally matter to whales too.

Brooke Gladstone: One thing we've learned in studying politics is that facts aren't going to convince anybody of anything. You quote Ricky Gervais saying that, but I've been hearing it from every expert I've spoken to. You have to change what they believe or you have to reach them on the level of their belief, but you've noted that scientists aren't trained to speak in narratives. They're much more inclined to speak in facts, and that's a problem.

Shane Gero: There are many excellent scientists in the world, and they're competing for very few jobs. I do spend a lot of time either in the field or doing public communication when I could be publishing more scientific papers or applying for more grants. There's no value judgment on whether the scientists do this or not, but I do think that we need to train our scientists to communicate their work. In some respects, that was learned from the whales. I do feel responsible to share their stories with everybody else in the hopes of protecting them.

When I say sharing their story, I construct that very differently than I construct a scientific research paper because the way that you formally write a paper has a very large introduction that brings you very far back and cites all of the work that has been done in this area. Whereas if you want to write something for a newspaper or a magazine, the takeaway needs to be upfront. The so what of that fact or discovery has to resonate with the audience that you want to talk to.

Brooke Gladstone: That's what we call the stakes. You have to apply that metric when deciding what to cover on the media as well, which is why we're talking to you because the story, fascinating as it is, has stakes beyond even learning the language of whales.

Shane Gero: Absolutely. That's the big hope for Project CETI is that it inspires people to pay attention to the oceans and wonder what does it mean if animals live rich and complicated lives like ours, and mostly our behavior is preventing them from doing so.

Brooke Gladstone: Do you dream of whales?

Shane Gero: [laughs] I'm sure I have. I don't know that I think in codas, [laughs] but especially when I'm doing something super contrived and human, like waiting in line and scanning my passport on a computer at an airport or something very human of me, I do often think, "What are the whales doing right now?" While we're talking, Digit is out there probably babysitting Hope, Can Opener is swimming in from the deep to reunite. Undoubtedly, Fingers is probably far off away from her family swimming on her own.

The younger ones, like Scar who we think left that family maybe 10 years ago now, is swimming somewhere far out in the ocean, becoming a mature sperm whale, and that's happening right now. It's easy to forget because of how fast-paced and complex human society has become, but I definitely do think about that multiple times every day.

Brooke Gladstone: Do they know you're there?

Shane Gero: I don't think I have the ego to assume they know who I am, but we've had some experiences, especially with this animal named Can Opener, where she will roll out of the water her eye and look at the people and follow them rather than echolocate, like using her sound to see like they do in the dark, on the hull of the boat. She's clearly not looking at the boat, she's looking at the people on the boat. This is beyond the science of their cognition and theory of mind that we can speak to, but we've had enough experiences to make us think that these animals have more going on and are aware of more things and we just have to set out good science about how to study and prove that to be true.

[music]

Brooke Gladstone: Shane, thank you so much.

Shane Gero: Oh, my pleasure. It was so great.

Brooke Gladstone: Shane Gero is a biologist focusing on the acoustic complexity and social behavior of cetaceans. He's the biology lead at Project CETI and founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Thanks for listening to the midweek podcast. Tune in to the big show this Friday and keep up with the show by following us on Instagram and Threads. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

[music]

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