Larry Lu

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A whale’s song [[https://trip-scan.top/|tripscan top]]

Advances in artificial intelligence are beginning to help experts like Johnson and Friedlaender spot patterns of behavior previously unseen, while others hope to use AI to eventually understand the “lyrics” in humpback song.

In December, a Templeton Foundation-funded team from the University of California at Davis and the Whale SETI Institute had a 20-minute “conversation” with a humpback in Alaska.

When they played a whale’s “thrruup” call recorded in the same spot the day before, a female humpback known as Twain responded 36 times, matching the intervals and waiting for responses from the boat.
“It’s very possible we were either playing back her own call or one of the calls from the individuals that were in that group,” Brenda McCowan, an animal behavior specialist at UC Davis told CNN. “These are a very different class of signals that are called social sounds, kind of a chatty, almost conversational,” whale biologist Fred Sharpe added. “We certainly don’t have evidence to call it language, but it does have language-like qualities in it, that they’re discrete units.”

The Alaska team’s federal permit only allowed it to engage with Twain for 20 minutes, and when they stopped the playback, “she basically called three times as she was moving away and then stopped,” McCowan said.

“It’s like, ‘where’d you go, my new friends? Where’d you go?’” Sharpe speculated.

While female humpbacks communicate in “thrruups” and “bloops,” only males sing in the haunting tones that travel so well through the depths, and there is debate over whether they are more like singers in a seductive boy band or rivals in a rap battle.

Carl Sagan was among the generation who believed they are mating calls like those of birds.

“But then that hypothesis has very little evidence behind it,” researcher Natalia Botero-Acosta told CNN while taking crossbow biopsies off the Pacific coast of Columbia. “So, there’s this whole different set of hypotheses, that it is a mechanism for males to interact with each other and maybe arrange those competitive groups. Or that it can promote ovulation for females.”

“I work with a couple of these projects that are trying to use AI to understand the context and the meaning to animal communication, but I don’t have a need to talk to a whale,” Friedlaender said when asked about the possibilities. “A whale shouldn’t have to tell us ‘Here’s all the things you’re doing to screw us.’”

“If I could talk to a whale, I’d say ‘Sorry,’” Friedlaender added.

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Larry Lu

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