Science!

Researchers studying thousands of recorded calls have discovered a kind of “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” embedded in their strings of “click” sounds.

The finding suggests these whales have a communication system considerably more complex than previously thought.


It also adds to almost a century of research on animals and insects that has chipped away at the long-held notion that humans alone possess an intricate system for conversing with one another.


For sperm whales, bursts of clicks known as a codas come in different varieties and form the building blocks of speech, just as human language emerges from the different vocal sounds we combine to form words and sentences.


The whales shape these codas into some 300 types by varying their duration, rhythm and tempo, and sometimes by adding an extra click. The researchers describe their discovery in a study published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.


“The very important caveat to add here is that we still don’t know whether you want to think of a coda as being a word, or like a sentence, or like an individual vowel or consonant,” said Jacob Andreas, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT who is one of the authors of the new study…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2024/05/07/sperm-whale-alphabet-clicks/