iStockphoto / srhtkn
If you had ‘humans converse with whales‘ on your 2023 BINGO card then go ahead and check that item off. A team of scientists collaborating between the SETI Institute, University of California-Davis, and the Alaska Whale Foundation have successfully pulled off a 20-minute conversation with an Alaskan humpback whale.
Does anybody know what they talked about? Well, the humans certainly don’t which makes the mental image of this ground-breaking encounter all the more entertaining.
Researchers used a 20-minute pre-recorded call to transmit to the humpback whale by using an underwater speaker. Then, the whale responded to each of the playback calls and according to SETI, the whale “matched the interval variations between each signal” while circling the team’s boat and responding in a “conversational style.”
The research was published at the end of November in PeerJ under the title “Interactive bioacoustic playback as a tool for detecting and exploring nonhuman intelligence: “conversing” with an Alaskan humpback whale.” It goes on to describe the nature of the recorded sounds, something called a “whup/throp” which “revealed an intentional human-whale acoustic (and behavioral) interaction.”
That last part is significant because the scientists feel as if they were able to demonstrate ‘intention’ on the part of the humpback whale. But as someone with a degree in Psychology, I cannot get past the anthropomorphism going on here.
There is simply no way to prove that the whale wasn’t just intrigued by the sounds and was responding because it viewed the people as nothing more than playthings. And just my typing that out is also anthropomorphism, there is no way to conclusively show the whale was interested in the sounds because it responded.
The hope here is this form of communication with another species could potentially be used to talk to aliens one day. But what is the point if (1) we don’t understand what we are communicating to the other species and (2) we cannot determine what they are saying back to us? I see no difference here than blasting music at a plant and saying it looks happier days later…
And honestly, this is not at all to devalue the work they’ve done. It really does seem to be a cross-species communication breakthrough between humans and whales. However, we simply cannot assign words like ‘conversation’ to blasting sounds at a whale and it responding because we haven’t the slightest idea what those sounds mean to that whale even if we think we do.