UC Davis animal behaviorists struck up a conversation with a humpback whale
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Whale researchers dropped a mic into the seas off southeast Alaska and recorded a humpback making a “whup”-like noise, translated roughly as a humpback hello. The next day, they lowered a speaker into the water and played the recorded “whup” back as a pod of whales passed by. One whale, a middle-aged female named Twain, responded in kind. For 20 minutes, Twain and the scientists “whupped” back and forth, 36 times in a row. Researchers even varied the timing of their calls and Twain matched their tempo.
“I’ve been studying animal communication for 30-plus years, and I’ve never experienced anything like that,” says Brenda McCowan, a researcher with the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. “We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language.’” And it could have implications far beyond the oceans: astrophysicists with the SETI Institute, which searches for extraterrestrial life, are developing algorithms that can quantify a signal’s complexity and extrapolate whether it’s the product of intelligent beings. They’re parsing humpbacks’ diverse vocal stylings as practice for the day when we intercept a similarly complex signal from the galaxy.