How to Speak Whale

How to Speak Whale; a voyage into the future of animal communication, by Tom Mustill, William Collins, 2023, a book review.

I am not sure about the title of this and nor is the author – he expresses misgivings a couple of times. I am just not sure it quite works. Nevertheless this is a very compelling and thought-provoking read. It is divided roughly into halves: the past and then the present and future. The central premise is that we may be able to use AI to crunch vast amounts of data to understand not just how animals communicate with each other, but what they are saying.

The introduction compares this with the work of Antonie van Leeuwenhock, the seveneenth-century inventor of magnifying devices which opened our eyes and minds to the existence of organisms invisible to the naked eye. He was the first microbiologist. We may now be on the verge of discovering a new world, of animal communication. We are tracked and our data mined constantly, what if that technology was focused elsewhere? A sort of Google translate for animals.

I was enthused by Mustill’s quoting no less than Captain James T. Kirk from Star Trek IV: the Voyage Home, one of the best of that franchise’s movies, which deals with the need to correct the disastrous loss of cetaceans on earth, at the very head of chapter one: “They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains the hottest blood of all.” There are two other Trekkie references, one to the Klingon language which is studied at many universities and a mock quote as though from Dr McCoy: “It’s language, Jim, but not as we know it.”

The author recounts a possibly near death experience in Monterey Bay: a humpback whale breaches and only just misses the kayak from which he and his partner were observing him. Whether the whale deliberately veered at the last second to avoid killing them is moot, but I suspect that was the case and the author concedes it is a strong possibility later in the book.

In Animal Trust I told of my own most dramatic cetacean encounter, by which I was awed but not at all frightened:

Decades ago there was a bottlenose dolphin living on his own off the coast of Northumberland (a stunningly beautiful and under-rated county that does not get the visitors it deserves if the paucity of the number people I know who have been is anything to go by and my girlfriend and I went to stay in Amble for a week and swam with Freddie every day. He was not pursued. One or at most two boats would go out and wait for him to come to them. He actively sought out human company. He would show off, catching a salmon and flipping it high into the air with his beak a few times before devouring it, not unlike a cat playing with a mouse. The skipper of the fishing boat was an archetypal salty sea-dog, who regarded his payload of southern, hippyish communers with nature, some with a keen interest in corn circles and crystal healing, with a wry, detached smile. Wearing wetsuits for the freezing water, we slipped into the grey sea one at a time.

When it was my turn, Freddie circled me a couple of times – and disappeared. Whilst I was looking around to see where he might surface, there was a sudden rush of water as Freddie came up out of the depths at great speed, propelled himself into the air and flew just inches over my head, before diving back down into the murk. To have a creature twice my body length and weighing more than half a ton skimming over my head with such precision and grace was unforgettable. Later, wearing mask and snorkel, I lay still in the water. Freddie came right up to me, our faces inches apart, and we looked into each others’ eyes, motionless, for at least five minutes.

No one is sure why Freddie was on his own, nor why he chose Amble. He remained for several years. Certainly the people of Amble were among the most hospitable I have ever encountered. Freddie had brought a certain amount of tourism and income to the place and we were part of that welcome influx, but nothing was too much trouble for our B&B hosts and when we went to the pub one night, pretty much everyone stood up, re-arranged the furniture and wouldn’t sit down again until they were sure that we were seated and comfortable. 

He was not always completely benign. An American guy had thought it would be amusing to stick his fingers into Freddie’s blowhole. The next time he went in the water a few days later, Freddie appeared out of nowhere and rammed him hard in the stomach. He could easily have killed him if he’d wanted to.

The author’s kayak was severely dented by the impact: “To breach, a humpback must reach speeds of up to twenty-six feet per second, an astounding velocity for a thing the size of a truck moving through water…” We don’t actually know why they breach. There may well be other reasons, but I wonder if it isn’t just for the joy of it.

There are stories of people rescuing whales and dolphins and vice versa. Is it possible that they sometimes ask us for help and are grateful? That they help us at all is extraordinary. My question is, how do they forgive us? On the other hand some species prey on others and toothed whales have even been known to assist in the capturing and killing of their baleen cousins by us. We are still finding new (to us) species and therefore cultures.

Having already won me over with the Kirk quote, Mustill mentions Dylan ‘croaking’ away on his car radio. Just the right word. He has enormous admiration for the great Dr Roger Payne, whose book Among Whales I am sure I used to have and read, perhaps the first of many since on the subject. Amongst his work was the release of albums of whale songs which were hugely significant in raising public awareness – in the end Tom Mustill suggests, they saved whales more through emotion and empathy than reason.

Details of the history of whaling are of course a tough read. From the factory ships with their exploding harpoons we wasted their lives for “dog food, fertilizer, lubricant, margarine, chewing gum and typewriter ribbons”. In the 1980s Soviet fleets were killing them to feed the wretched inhabitants of Siberian fur farms. We killed some three million whales in the twentieth century.

Our arrogance knows no bounds. Why, Roger Payne asks, is the information sent out on our deep space probes entirely anthropocentric? Other life out there will probably not think much of us for that.

There follows a long section on dissections, which for me are gruesome albeit scientifically valuable.

Then the difficulty of measuring ‘intelligence’, a “treacherous” area to explore. Comparisons with humans’ problem-solving abilities are meaningless. There’s a wonderful quote from a Yosemite National Park Ranger who was asked why it was proving so hard to make a bear-proof garbage bin: “There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists.” But … why should the similarly structured brains of whales not serve to proudce, for example, memories and consciousness as they do in us? Cetaceans tend to have a wider gap between the hemispheres of their brains than us which it is thought may enable “unihemispheric sleep” – like Swifts who sleep on the wing, whales can rest one half of their brain at a time so that they can continue to surface to breathe and to keep one eye open for danger.

There are excellent descriptions of what it feels like to be scanned through sonar by a whale or a dolphin, “like standing in front of the bass speakers at a loud concert”. I used to do that a lot and loved the total body vibration. One pregnant dolphin scanned and took particular interest in a woman in the water. She didn’t know it herself, but she too turned out to be pregnant.

We tend to think of language as a purely spoken thing, and even then there are of course many animal sounds way outside our limited range of hearing, but there are so many other ways to communicate, including sensing electrical charges on skin, using colour and smell. The linguist Charles Hockett influentially listed seven properties of human language (later expanded to sixteen), including semanticity, discreteness, productivity, displacement, cultural transmission and prevarication, suggesting that these set us apart.

It seems certain that dolphins and whales have names, or at least signature whistles. They imitate and can put ‘words’ together in new combinations to form new concepts.

I liked the author’s tongue-in-cheek anti-Linnean comment: “Most [now extinct at our hands] species died before the waves of Europeans with their classifying fetish had discovered and bestowed Latin names on them …” He has a point and I do ask myself if my own passion for identifying species is terribly useful or beneficial, but it does help to forge a connection I think.

Technology has given us new ways to listen: cheap little machines can record the sounds of a forest and algorithms can then identify different birdsongs or even “the whine of the malarial mosquito”. Now we can take this a great deal further but there is too much data for us to cope with – but not too much for pattern-finding machines. Thus was born the science of bioacoustics (or ecoacoustics or biophony). We can archive, analyse and compare living sounds, conduct playback experiments, record sounds we cannot hear, and record cetacean voices. From this we have learnt, for example, that it is a myth that only male birds sing: 71% of species of songbird species have female song. We have long assumed otherwise through a prejudice against the generally drabber and quieter females.

There’s a clever point about the time AI can save us: we then spend that time looking at our phones, “at news apps, shopping sites and social media, all of which have been beautifully designed and pumped full of AI whose purpose is to suck up [our] money and time and data.” But from analysing dolphin sounds we now know that they can have more than five hundred whistles, and perhaps will learn that they have meaning in a way that we can understand.

Mustill paints excellent cameo portraits of people which make you warm to them. Biologist Aza Raskin is “darkly bearded, with an expression alternating between wonder and concern; Britt Selvitelle, with curly brown hair, the founder of a Silicon Valley megalith who seemed more like a friendly volunteer on an organic farm.” Professor Ari Friedlaender is like a “rock star … Perpetually sandalled, bearded and with long flowing hair, Ari is the closest marine mammal science has to “the Dude” from The Big Lebowski.”

What has changed now is the vast quantity of data now available and artificial neural networks to decode it. Work on the CETI programme, the Cetacean Translation Initative began in 2021. Dr Roger Payne said that if it succeeds it will “change our respect for the rest of life entirely – as in completely, utterly, shockingly, surprisingly, unexpectedly, fully.” And whales are perhaps just the beginning.

It was at precisely this point in the book that I began to feel a little queasy and a few pages on, the author reveals his own doubts: “Are we ready to listen at all?” Philosopher Melanie Challenger said that “the world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal.”

There’s a list of what animals can do, of which we used to think, wrongly, only humans were capable:

“Making tools
Co-operating to achieve tasks
Planning ahead
Having menopause
Understanding abstract concepts
Memorising hudreds of words
Remembering long number sequences
Doing simple mathematics
Recognizing human faces
Making and having riends
Kissing with tongues
Experiencing mental illnesses
Grieving
Using syntax
Falling in “love”
Feeling jealous
Accurately mimicking human speech
Experiencing awe, wonder, or even “spiritual experiences”
Feeling pain
Feeling pleasure
Gossiping
Killing for “pleasure” (where no food, defense, or other reason is known)
Playing
Exhibiting morality
Demonstrating a sense of fairness
Performing altruistic behaviour
Making art
Keeping time, moving to the beat, and dancing
Laughing, including when tickled
Weighing up probabilities before making decisions
Emotional contagion (feeling pain when seeing others in pain [empathy])
Rescuing and comforting one another
Displaying accents and cultural differences in sign and verbal signals
Having and transmitting cultures
Predicting the intentions of others
Intentionally intoxicating themselves with alcohol and other substances
Manipulating and deceiving others

It’s quite a list – most of our realisations are remarkably, perhaps shockingly recent.

We wheel round to the Conservative Party in the UK in 2017 which voted down a law stating that animals were sentient beings. Michael Gove said that it was to do with Brexit, of all things. There are encouraging signs that this way of thinking is on its way out and that animals and even other living beings will be accorded legal status and rights.

Greta Thunberg says, “Because we are part of nature, when we protect nature, we are nature protecting itself.”

How to Speak Whale delves into all these matters and more in far greater depth than might be suggested here. The possibilities, using AI, are endless, if we are to be trusted with them.

The best way to end this post seems to repeat the quote employed by Mustill from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.