Valeria Vergara: \u2018In my tent, blind, surrounded by fog, with a cacophony of beluga sounds coming to me.\u2019 Photograph: Gretchen Freund<\/p>\n
Sound is the fabric of these creatures\u2019 highly sociable lives: they sing in breeding grounds, chatter in groups during birth, and echo-locate to help each other find food. Individual species have dozens of distinctive dialects, and the structural makeup of their communication<\/a> shows parallels with human speech. Whales also produce the loudest sounds of any animal, the same that once resonated through the wooden hulls of whaling ships, unsettling hunters of old.<\/p>\n With the emergence of new analytical technologies, insights into whale communication are amassing swiftly. In an era when most whales are protected from hunting but face myriad other threats, researchers are asking: what clues do their sounds contain to better protect whales from a noisier, warmer and more unpredictable ocean?<\/p>\n The beauty of acoustic data is that it is a relatively easy way to gather information about marine mammals: a single floating hydrophone can record years of sound from passing whales. This eavesdropping has yielded discoveries both delightful and profound.<\/p>\n Beginning with the study of infant whales during her doctorate, Vergara, who is director of the cetacean research programme at Raincoast Conservation Foundation<\/a>, a Canadian environmental charity, discovered that like humans, baby belugas have to learn to communicate from adults<\/a>, which involves plenty of charming gibberish along the way.<\/p>\n Belugas at Cunningham Inlet in the Qikiqtaaluk region of Nunavut, Canada. Baby belugas \u2018babble like toddlers\u2019, says Vergara. Photograph: Valeria Vergara<\/p>\n \u201cIt will take them a good two, three years to begin to be proficient at the beluga repertoire. They are clumsy initially. They play with sound \u2013 they babble, very much like human toddlers,\u201d Vergara says.<\/p>\n One of the first sounds they perfect is an \u201cacoustic name tag\u201d to identify themselves, she explains. But her more recent work<\/a> has revealed that the underwater range of these self-identifying calls by baby belugas is 18 times smaller than an adult\u2019s, and therefore easily masked by boat noise. This raises the worry that babies who get separated from their mothers in large beluga pods may become permanently lost.<\/p>\n On the strength of research by Vergara and others, in 2018, Canadian authorities decided to close off key beluga meeting grounds<\/a> to boats, allowing the \u201cfaint, tentative, underdeveloped calls of little calves\u201d to be heard, Vergara says. She sees this as one example of why acoustic monitoring matters, revealing \u201cthere are so many things that humans can do\u201d.<\/p>\n Vergara photographing whales. Coupling acoustic recordings with drone footage may allow specific calls to be linked to certain habits. Photograph: Alex Harris<\/p>\n Belugas are at the chattier end of the whale spectrum, but all cetacean species have diverse vocal repertoires. Some also share distinctive constellations of sound<\/a> solely within their own populations, teaching and learning from one another. It is a social engine that can drive hundreds of unique dialects within species.<\/p>\n Intriguingly, researchers have found that these dialects often correlate to unique behavioural differences<\/a> between groups, such as specific foraging and migration habits.<\/p>\n Take the keening whistles, squawks and squeals of a distinct group of 74 endangered orcas<\/a> that rove around the Canadian part of the Salish Sea. For years, Raincoast scientists have been tuning in on this population\u2019s calls, but with little idea of what they mean. Now, by coupling the recordings with observational drone footage<\/a>, they are hoping individual calls can be linked to particular orca habits.<\/p>\n The goal is to inform more targeted conservation measures that go beyond \u201ca blanket statement that [shipping] noise is bad, but to say noise interferes with their ability to share food, or [coordinate their hunts] over larger areas,\u201d Vergara says.<\/p>\n It was once a controversial idea that whales have unique behaviours, such as dialects, shared socially within groups, because that is the definition of culture, previously seen as the preserve of humans alone.<\/p>\n Now it is accepted that many species have whole cultural traditions shared between kin \u2013 with one of the most enigmatic embodied in the songs of the humpback whale<\/a>. Only male humpbacks sing, composing units of sound<\/a> into \u201cphrases\u201d, repeated to form \u201cthemes\u201d, a number of which are then arranged to produce unique songs.<\/p>\n \u201cI like to think of this as movements in a symphony, from one to the next,\u201d says Dr Ellen Garland, a researcher at St Andrews University in Scotland, who specialises in songs of humpbacks in the South Pacific.<\/p>\n A curious humpback whale swims up to the camera. The males\u2019 adoption of new songs suggest that the species love novelty. Photograph: Wildestanimal\/Getty<\/p>\n It is not fully understood why the males sing, whether to attract mates, reinforce male bonds, or gather information about their environments. What is known is that individual groups each have a unique song<\/a>, and that it is constantly evolving as whales delete and add new themes, which all the males in a population will then learn as one, like a choir singing from the same hymn sheet.<\/p>\n Building on decades of others\u2019 recordings, combined with hundreds of her own, Garland has discovered<\/a> something extraordinary: an individual song will move in an unstoppable wave between neighbouring humpback populations, spreading from west to east across the entire South Pacific.<\/p>\n \u201cWithin a season, [a population will] literally throw what they have out the window and rapidly learn this completely new song from their neighbours,\u201d Garland says. \u201cIt\u2019s like abandoning your national anthem for something your neighbour is singing.\u201d<\/p>\n A sperm whale. Each \u2018clan\u2019 has its own unique mix of sounds. Photograph: Amanda Cotton\/Ceti<\/p>\n The animals seem unable to resist novelty, and she is trying to understand why. \u201cNo other animal does these rapid and complete population-wide changes, except for humans,\u201d she says. \u201cSo we have to draw analogies with human pop music, with human fashion.\u201d<\/p>\n These \u201ccultural waves\u201d are becoming important for conservation. Because whale dialects are associated with other unique behaviour, they can be used to identify whale populations whose habits might make them more vulnerable to environmental threats.<\/p>\n One of the first case studies for incorporating animals\u2019 cultural knowledge into conservation decisions involved sperm whales, says Taylor Hersh, a researcher with Bristol University\u2019s Cetacean Communication and Cognition Group. These animals produce complex clicking sounds, the social glue of their deep-diving matrilineal societies, and the focus of Hersh\u2019s work<\/a>.<\/p>\n Their sounds are composed of \u201ccodas\u201d, each one containing a unique number, arrangement and tempo of clicks. Several codas are common across sperm whale groups or \u201cclans\u201d. But Hersh and the rest of a large international team of researchers discovered that individual clans in the Pacific also have one preferred coda<\/a>, so effective at distinguishing individual populations that she calls it their \u201cidentity coda\u201d.<\/p>\n Why sperm whales use these is still a mystery. \u201cOur best guess is that it reinforces their bond,\u201d she says, adding jokily: \u201cIt would be like me \u2013 which I would never do \u2013 going somewhere and saying \u2018American!\u2019 and someone responding with \u2018American! American!\u2019 It seems like it\u2019s this way of reaffirming that they\u2019re part of the same group.\u201d<\/p>\n That can function like a geotag, pinging the location of sperm whale clans, and telling researchers whether their behaviours are a good match for local ocean conditions. \u201cIn most parts of the world, things are getting worse for animals, and so we need to have the best available information about how to conserve them,\u201d Hersh says.<\/p>\n \u201cCultural insights, which for sperm whales most easily come from dialects, can be really helpful for doing that.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond conservation, Hersh likes to be immersed in the sperm whales\u2019 auditory landscape, because it lets her consider the world from the perspective of these animals she admires.<\/p>\n They have \u201creally beautiful societies\u201d structured around female relationships and are peaceful. This leaves a lot for humans to be awed by and learn from, she says. \u201cAnything that knocks human exceptionalism down the peg is good in my book!\u201d<\/p>\n Meanwhile, looking at a population of sperm whales off the Dominican coast, Project Ceti<\/a> (Cetacean Translation Initiative), a US research nonprofit organisation, is training machine-learning AI on their communication and using it to detect new patterns, with the eventual goal of translation.<\/p>\n This research has revealed that sperm whales use different codas<\/a> in different contexts, and that with the gaps between clicks removed, some codas produce sounds more like what the researchers describe as \u201cvowels\u201d than clicks.<\/p>\n Dominican sperm whales also change the tempo and frequency of some codas in the presence of shipping noise<\/a>, intimating that the clicks may carry specific, controlled meanings, according to Ga\u0161per Begu\u0161, linguist lead at Project Ceti.<\/p>\n The findings could add up to something profound, he believes. \u201cI think this research is reframing how we think of language,\u201d he says, \u201cand how we can extend it to some species.\u201d<\/p>\n Project Ceti divers with their hydrophone. Researchers hope AI can detect enough patterns to eventually translate whales\u2019 language. Photograph: Project Ceti<\/p>\n This is a controversial idea among cetacean researchers, with several saying that similarities between human and whale communication systems is not the same as whales having language in the true sense. But there is broad agreement that understanding more about how whales interact could help us to improve their protection.<\/p>\n The definition of language has long been a legal barrier between those who do and do not have rights, Begu\u0161 says. \u201cIf you\u2019re showing that there\u2019s a blurry line, that means that we need to push that expansion of rights further to these creatures,\u201d he says, noting that this is not a new idea: Indigenous Polynesian peoples have already recognised whales\u2019 legal personhood<\/a>.<\/p>\n It is tempting to leap from language to another idea: will we ever speak to whales? Some researchers have attempted experiments<\/a> where calls are transmitted to whales to simulate a conversational back-and-forth. But these interventions can confuse whales\u2019 cultural exchanges and cause severe distress, meaning playback experiments are now considered ethically fraught<\/a>.<\/p>\n And Vergara says the question misses the point: \u201cThis idea that we are going to talk to whales puts us suddenly at the centre of things. Why do we need to go there for something to be fundamentally important?\u201d<\/p>\n Instead of aiding our understanding, she thinks that \u201cblinds us to discoveries that might be really interesting because of how much they differ from humans\u201d.<\/p>\n Recalling the cacophony of beluga chatter that day in the tent, the question on her mind was not what they would say to us, but how their tapestry of trills and squeals enabled them to survive in their vast underwater world \u2013 and what that in turn could reveal about how we can help protect them. \u201cIt was such a moment of clarity,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 2015, the whale researcher Valeria Vergara pitched a small tent at the icy water\u2019s edge on Somerset…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":751403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-751402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=751402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/751403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=751402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=751402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=751402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Audio](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Audio_recording_of_beluga_whales_communicating_within_their_herd--a6fa20e0-eeb5-4c3b-8547-7efc26d7c2.jpeg\")
Audio recording of beluga whales communicating within their herd<\/p>\n![\"Humpback](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Humpback_whales_singing_in_the_waters_of_French_Polynesia--57e7d76f-7c45-4f04-b5ff-ed0de51f8444-2.0..jpeg\")
Humpback whales singing in the waters of French Polynesia<\/p>\n![\"Sperm](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Sperm_whale_in_Dominica_--5d824ba3-7654-4666-acc3-9dda8df3ef68-1.0.0000000.jpg\")
Sperm whales in Dominica change their codas when ships are near<\/p>\n