Do whales tell tall tales?
This is Sandra Tsing Loh with the Loh Down on Science.
Sperm whales communicate through sequences of clicking sounds called “codas.” How much meaning do these codas carry?
Gasper Begus and team at UC Berkeley used machine learning to study codas. They found that the tone, not just the timing of codas, has patterns and meaning.
Previous research only focused on the timing. However, the team found acoustic properties that are similar to the letters ‘i’ and ‘a’! This means that sperm whale speech is more similar to human speech than we thought!
And this language is a window into whales’ lives.
Whales might not just be making waves. They might be making meaning!
Reference: Beguš, G., Sprouse, R. L., Leban, A., Silva, M., & Gero, S. (2025). Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas. Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science, 9, 1849–1874. https://doi.org/10.1162/OPMI.a.252