Decoding Sperm Whale Communication with David Gruber | Project CETI

[00:00:02]Welcome to New Thinking for a New [music] World, a Telberg Foundation podcast. I am Alan Stoga, your host.

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[00:00:33]And now for today's episode of [music] New Thinking for a New World.

[00:00:40]The whale has no voice, Herman Melville wrote. But then again, he went on, what has the whale to say? Fast forward to the 21st century, and the answer turns out to be quite a bit. Sperm whales are humongous. Males can be 18 m long and weigh 45 tons. Think something the weight of an industrial dump truck but twice as long. But they apparently are quite sociable and spent a lot of time chatting with each other. What are they saying? That's the question that my guest today has committed an enormous amount of academic expertise, effort, and money to answer. David Gruber organized and leads project SETI which stands for Citation Translation Initiative. Welcome David to New Thinking for a New World.

[00:01:28]>> Oh, thanks Alan. It's it's it's really a pleasure to be here today with you.

[00:01:32]>> I should probably begin by apologizing for using a Melville reference, but it struck me as a wonderful if unfortunate summary of the inherent bias about whales and more generally about anything other than humans by humans.

[00:01:47]What is it about these amazing mammals that so interests you as a marine biologist and a technologist?

[00:01:54]What is it about these amazing mammals that so interests you as a marine biologist? God, I'm super fascinated with whales. I mean, I'm I'm interested with so many different types of marine life and and I started out my career um more really looking at the microbiology and the origin of life in the ocean and the interactions of the tiniest the bacteria and the prozzoa and um in the last few decades I've really worked my way up. So now moving into whales. Um I mean one of the things I kind of stayed away from whales because they were the charismatic megapona and I was more interested in these kind of weird microbial forms of life that that really do much of the ecosystem processes. Um but now that I'm kind of looking at sperm whales, they are fascinating. you bring up Melville and and I recently, you know, I recently went back and and read Moby Dick and and and I just love Melville's like interest in settology and there's a whole chapter there and the fascination with whales and it's the same thing even today, you know, in the 1800s. Um that that book was actually inspired by a um uh we have a I actually have a copy over here. It's called the biology of the sperm whale by Thomas Beal. Um and it has Melville's notes in it. I found it at the at the Harvard Hton Library, a copy of it, and I can see how they've captured the imagination. I mean, here's this here's this marine mammal. So, it's a mammal like us. It breathes air. Um, it needs to surface to to breathe, but yet it's essentially over the last um tens of millions of years to become a deep sea creature. Um, and it takes that breath of air and then it dives down over a mile. um and what it's doing down there.

[00:03:44]We know it's obviously eating quite a few squid. Um but how it's doing it and how it's so successful and and how it's slowly began its descent um and become almost a deep sea creature and and yet they do things similar to us. They they um they give live birth uh at the surface. They um they breastfeed. Um they sleep at the surface. So they they've had to like figure out everything that we do as a MBLE, but they do it in the water um 24/7. So for me, they're just like they tap into this kind of dream center of possibility and and unlike like a dog or a cat or domesticated animals that are around us all the time, like it's not that easy to have a relationship with a sperm whale.

[00:04:33]Um it they live in deep water. I see you laughing there. What are you thinking about that in your >> I'm thinking that no one's ever said that before speculated on the difficulty of having a relationship with a sperm whale.

[00:04:45]>> It's it's challenging and and I think you know this is this is one of the things I realized that having lived a life getting to know different marine creatures. How fortunate that is. Like I've I've spent hundreds of hours, you know, even with just jellyfish, just getting to know them, just watching them, just seeing how they they live their life. Um and um you know, but a jellyfish we could keep in an aquarium tank and just stare at them all day. Uh a whale, that's one of the beauties about sperm whales and one of the challenges is that it's almost impossible to keep a sperm whale captive. They're diving, you know, a mile down to eat squid in the deep sea.

[00:05:24]There's um there there's there's been very very few, thankfully, examples of of any sperm whales in in any form of captivity. Um, so you really have to go out into their world to get to know them and and now to kind of trace back a little bit like the history of humans getting to know sperm whales. You know, you bring up Melville and our first interaction with them was just hunting them and and and seeing them as food and seeing them as oil. the spermiceti oil in their head um was was like a pre pre-industrial form of uh of oil to light lamps and um and candles.

[00:06:04]>> And the head is something like onethird of the body. Yes, it is one of the one of they call it one of the largest one oneird of the body is the head and a big part of that is this fabulously intricate sound producing organ. And even just to think about it, I think a lot about like how this all happened.

[00:06:24]Like so one nostril rolled over the head and became the blowhole. And they're using that to breathe. And then the other nostril is part of this sound producing apparatus. So they're they're they're they're using these things called phonic lips and they're they're snapping air back and forth. Then the sound travels backward through the back of the head, bounces off the back, and then goes through a series of waxes.

[00:06:49]It's called the bent horn hypothesis because it's it's still not even confirmed how they're making sounds. Um unlike like a bird that you could put in an MRI machine and really see um how the sound produces happen. Here we're just kind of um still in the theory stage, but they make sound they call it bio sonar or bio sound that's some of the loudest made in the in the animal kingdom. It's uh could be almost twice as loud as an airplane taking off. But imagine you going underwater and trying to make a sound that loud. Like even just do that as an exercise now. Like pretend you're hold your breath, go underwater in your bathtub or wherever this vision is and try to make a very loud sound. You'll see it's very challenging, you know, but this is something that um tens of millions of years of evolution has allowed sperm whales to come up with this very sophisticated complex um vocal apparatus. But it's not just sounds. You are convinced that they're communicating with each other. It sounds with a purpose. We'll get to what language is in a minute, but they're to use to be a metaphor. They're talking to each other.

[00:08:01]>> Oh, they're definitely talking to each other. I mean, if you watch them or spend time with them, you hear the sounds and you hear it going back and forth and and and that's been well studied in the last several decades. And you know, but even kind of to pace it back to Melville though, in Melville's time, they didn't know they were making these sounds. It wasn't until like in the 1950s that they recognized that sperm whales are making these clicks um and they were able to say that they they are vocalizing. And then later they found out that they're making two different types of vocalizations.

[00:08:36]One more at the surface called kodas.

[00:08:39]these, they call them stereotypical types of clicks that they're using in more social settings. But when they start diving down and they're hunting and they're looking for squid, they they change into a different type of sound, which is their echolocation clicks, which are much more like a metronome.

[00:08:56]And as they're kind of getting closer in on the prey, they get faster and faster and faster. So, it's like they're using sound, they're sending out a signal, and in this huge brain, an 18lb brain that they have, the largest brain that we know of in the universe, is processing these echoes in ways that we really don't understand yet.

[00:09:19]>> So, let's take a second and listen to some of that sound.

[00:09:38]>> [music] >> This is from a a very well doumented unit of whales in Dominica. And they are um you'll hear this typical they call it the 113. Click click click click click.

[00:10:12]And you'll hear this conversing back and forth. But if you listen closely, you'll notice that those spaces aren't all perfectly. You can't just say every one of those vocalizations is just a 113.

[00:10:25]Sometimes they're a little faster. So there's variations in tempo, there's variations in rhythm, there's variations in robboto. And then sometimes there's actually one extra click in there and that actually symbolizes what we call an ornament. And these variations are used in both contextual depending on the context of the situation and they can combine them much like a human could combine words like I went to the store and then the market and then the you know and then to the movie theater and keep going on and on and on. Um and um so this was a discovery that we had found just last year and it's it's called the sperm whale phonetic alphabet and it kind of showed this vast complexity space in the sperm whale communication system that kind of put them in a different level um than they'd previously been thought of.

[00:11:24]You know, previously they just thought, oh, there's these groups and they they do have regional accents. So there is like a British and a Scottish accent among the clans and you could tell them apart by their accents, but they didn't know there was this much going on in in the kind of nuances in how they're talking. And in the coming week, we're actually uh there's a linguist on the team, Jasper Begus, and he had just carefully been listening to these clicks. And there was a key kind of moment where we we hold a conference once a year at at uh at UC Berkeley, the Simons Institute of the theory of computing. We call it decoding communication and non-human species workshop. And we bring all these other folks that are working with other animal species. And and we brought Joyce P and Mickey Part that are working with elephants. And it was in that talk that Gasper kind of pieced together that timing is very important. For instance, with an elephant, they may say something and it may take 15 minutes for the other elephant to respond to the conversation.

[00:12:28]But that's very unlike our old world primate way of communicating. And in that way of thinking about timing, Gasper was able to kind of think about the timing of the sperm well clicks in a different way. And if he took out the spacing in between and he compressed them, he started to see what looked like vowels um amongst that.

[00:12:51]That's the obvious question. Do you think and your colleagues think of this as language with all that implies? Obviously, there's communication going on.

[00:13:02]Communication systems are one thing.

[00:13:04]Language is another thing, although perhaps on a continuum. I'm not a linguist obviously, but is it a continuum and and where do you think where do you and your colleagues think of of the sperm whales on that continuum? That's a great question and and to preface it, I'm not a linguist either. And and that's one of the beauties of project SETI is that we really rely on domain expertise. is like I'm a marine biologist and I'm good at putting together inter interdisciplinary teams, but we have AI experts, we have cryptographers, we have underwater acousticians, um we have people that specialize in network science, um and and we have people that really specialize in linguistics. So I I leave these kinds of deeper debates in the linguistic community to the linguists. But my take on it is we're getting it's kind of interesting like we as a human species came up with the word language um and we kind of set this very rigid criteria for it that only we could jump over that bar um because we made it up and it applies to us. So it depends on how you define it.

[00:14:07]Um, and if you put these rigid terms in place, no one else could ever jump over this fence and and have language >> by definition. But if you see language as more you said at the continuum of like um it's not a hard rigid thing and it could be seen along um a suite of lines and and I think for for for for this we keep seeing there's more and more sophistication to their communication system and they're doing things more and more like humans do. Um, so that's a great question. Like when does it pass the threshold and when do us humans agree? I've kind of decided to wait out of that battle because if you say, "Oh, sperm whales have a very sophisticated communications system."

[00:14:57]Like nobody gets upset. But if you say sperm whales have language, like it's like touching the third rail and all of a sudden, you know, there's a big argument over the word language. So, for the time being, like um I'm just kind of, you know, just happy to be continuingly showing the the sophistication and the nuance and the complexity of sperm whale vocalizations and their communication system.

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[00:15:45]I have so many directions I'd like to take this. Maybe the the most immediate one is what you're probing obviously is nonhuman communication. And that is a question that can apply in lots of different spaces in nature.

[00:16:03]As you think about what you're doing, David, are you developing protocols, understandings, technologies that are in the first instance, of course, aimed at the sperm whale, but have other implications? How do you keep your team focused on the sperm whale as opposed to other things where obviously there's potential implications?

[00:16:25]>> That's a that's a great question. And first I want to go back to just your your your the your your observation that we call ourselves CCTI. Um and we're the Citation Translation Initiative, but we're really an homage to SCTI.

[00:16:41]>> Yeah. I absolutely love it. I absolutely love it. Yes.

[00:16:44]>> Here I'm sitting here with like an original copy of Carl Sean's contact and um the the SETI pioneers um scientists talk about their search for extraterrestrial intelligence. I think in one sense I'm really inspired by this search for extraterrestrial but as a marine biologist like my career has been honed inward. Um so we're interraterial exploration and there's millions of species that we inhabit the planet with and many of them we've not even known or even described yet. So, while I'm fully supportive of like the idea that there's 10 to the 30 stars out there and there's probably a very high chance that there's some sophisticated communication system in like form in another galaxy.

[00:17:35]Here we are on this planet right now and there is incredible um animals that are doing things and communicating in ways that we've just now been provided the tools that we could actually look at this. So if we were to ever imagine if we found a sperm whale and something that communicates the way it does like on some distant planet like I mean humans would go crazy but do we have the tools yet to even understand how we might do it? No. This is what we're doing. Let's talk about those tools because you are a technologist and the technology you're using allows you to do things that a moment ago were unimaginable.

[00:18:25]One of the things you I've heard you talk about are what you call very gentle robots. Uh which is a fabulous description. What what's a very gentle robot? Well, this is a a field of robotics that that I was introduced to by by Robert Wood, who's a professor of um um of engineering at Harvard University, and he heads the the Harvard Micro Robotics Lab. We met at National Geographic in in 2014 and I was showing a video where I was in a submarine using one of these like five function manipulator arms like the kind that you see at a carnival to like pick up a stuffed animal to try to interact with the deep sea life. And and he was like, "Wow, this is clunky and invasive." Um, had you heard of the field of soft robotics? And we began on this journey which is continuing today of like developing some of the most gentle robots in the world. But we we have a kind of Rob and I are also were we're incredibly good friends. Um which is important when in scientific collaborations too because you're spending so much time with your your collaborators. And we meet at a um you know at a at a bar in Cambridge called Charlie's. And um and there was in one of these meetings there where we were talking about a Stephen Hawking quote where Stephen Hawking was saying that the the full-blown development of AI and robotics was going to lead to the human extinction and you know making this prophetic statement and we sat there being like we're the scientists inventing this stuff like why would we invent something that is going to bring our species to extinction? Like why would we do this? So, you know, our form of protest was like, well, we're going to see this from the other side. We're going to try to work on making some of the most gentle, empathetic, caring robots in the world. And um and that's kind of that we've we've really taken that ethics with us in the formation of Project Steady where Rob is now making the all the various robots that are um that are being used for for this project. And um one of the suction cups that we're using is inspired by clingfish and sucker fish because um they're able to adhere he adhere to things without harming. And um so we're kind of looking to nature for some of the most gentle forms of interaction.

[00:20:49]One of our our really like fun projects that we did is we designed they were called ultra gentle soft robotic fingers um affectionately called linguini fingers. And we did an experiment um where we went to the New England Aquarium and we had them interact with jellyfish and we were able to show um that these ultra gentle fingers didn't even stress a jellyfish.

[00:21:14]And now they're being used to like pick strawberries and um and other forms of very gentle robotic manipulation. But um yeah, we're really proud of the fact that we we've come up with a robot that could interact with life with onetenth of the pressure of your eyelid resting on your eyeball.

[00:21:30]>> And clearly you're using large language models to analyze the sounds that you're collecting which must be which again wasn't possible a moment ago and now is incredibly sophisticated and and changes gets becomes more sophisticated every day. that has to be critical to the translation process.

[00:21:53]>> True. And and this I mean if you think about it with AI now this is one of the craziest most impactful tools technologies that has landed on our species in our lifetimes and has the potential to really shift and shake everything up for the good and the bad. And I think anytime a new technology is presented, it should be really treated with caution and care. But I think in in our case, we're really looking for like the positive way that it can be used. Like how can we use all this amazing new AI in a way that actually brings us closer to nature. But to step back a little bit, when this project started in 2018, I was doing a Radcliffe fellowship at Harvard and across the hall was um a cryptographer, Shafi Goldboser, and she was working on translation. Um much of the AI today of large language models kind of has its roots in translation, Google translate. Um and some of the tools that they were using in translation were taking languages and looking at them in multi-dimensional space you know like several hundred dimension and seeing patterns on how words are associated and um and that was kind of giving us and that's exactly you know the early days of chat GPT is about predicting the next word and so we took some of these technologies and um began applying them to sperm well vocalizations and essentially just like we predict and we started to see like wow some of these tools that are designed for humans actually work really well with sperm well clicks um you know and that kind of really began us on the journey but one of the things to kind of point out is it's definitely not plugandplay like you cannot just take an off-the-shelf human language model and be like oh I'm going to just let this translate whale communication like it's been hard because so much of our AI is designed with one singular focus for one species, Homo sapiion, and our language and all the books we've written and all the text we have, but it's not really just yet been used for other species. Like I just heard your dog barking. Um, and there probably are some there are some companies that are looking at that, but we already know you are communicating with your dog. Like you don't really need a translator in between you and your dog. um you're already having a very deep interspecies relationship um that that might not be possible with um other animals.

[00:24:32]>> Let's go back to the sperm whale um for a moment. I'm thinking about that 18lb brain now. You've been working with whales not for a long time but but for a while. And can you see is there learning going on? Is there obviously there's intelligence by definition have a brain, you have intelligence. I remember a neuroscience friend told me once that what he can do to a mouse's brain, he can do to my brain because they're just scaled up. They're the same thing, just neural systems. How do you think about a sperm whale's brain and intelligence and and capacity? Does that question even make any sense?

[00:25:11]>> No, of course it makes sense. And I and I'm I'm trying to think of the best way to to to kind of dive into that. And I I think in one sense it's a complex question. And for one, size doesn't necessarily matter. Um the same thing goes with genome sizes. Like there's amoebas that have much larger genomes than humans do. Um there's dinoflagulates in the ocean that these single-c cellled animals that have wildly complex genomes, even more than the human genome. And when it gets to brain there's some things you look at like they call it in sephilization quotient. Um so so it's not just like the size of the matter and there's you know could separate it out into cle and neurons and and density but I didn't want to get kind of trapped in that and I I think the fact that it's a very large brain the fact that it's developed independently than terrestrial mammals the fact that it's processing echoes and being very successful they're living very communal lives Um, sperm whales live in matrineal societies. So, it's grandmothers, mothers, and kids. And it's matrinal means that there's not a single matriarch, which is the dominant female, that they kind of share the leadership.

[00:26:27]And the males when they get to a certain age, they leave and they'll become world travelers and go from pole to pole and sometimes they come back. So little is known. I mean there's so much you know story and just like my hat goes to the amount of information that we even have at present is from like careful observations of a few scientists that kind of made these observations and and got to know certain groups of whales including Shane Garrow and and Hal Whitehead which are Shane is the lead whale biologist for SETI and he was trained by Hal Whitehead who was actually trained by Roger Payne who was my mentor and Roger Payne discovered in 1970s that whales have song. Um, and the fact that, and this was more from humpback whales, and the fact that they were singing inspired this entire environmental movement, the save the whale movement, which is one of the most successful environmental movements in history and it led to the saving several whale species from extinction. But even Roger and I as as you bring back the size like Roger when I when I was reaching out to whale biologists in the beginning, he was one of the first ones that was like took my phone call because um I wasn't a whale biologist. So everyone was like, you know, why is this guy that studies sharks and sea turtles suddenly interested in whales? But Roger, you know, was so welcoming and um and kind of open to the idea, but at the same time, he really wanted this project to be about humpac whales. Um because he spent his career getting to know and love humpaxs. But we chose this more because the sperm whale vocalizations are being done both by males and females, and they're they're doing it, you know, as a communication system. So it had more amendable to machine learning. Um whereas with the humpback it's more about singing a certain song could be 20 30 minutes long at certain times of the year um related more to mating. So it while it is a form of communication we were much more attracted to these clicks of the sperm wells the kodas. They're they're more like ones and zeros. Um, and and I think we doubled down on one species in the beginning because if you go off and try to do everything at once, and you brought up mice, too. That's a, you know, and how you might know a lot about mice and how that relates to humans, like mice are some of the most studied animals in the world, like mus. Um, and the reason is is because they're an they're an analogy to the human brain.

[00:29:04]And so if you it's it's not easy to study a human brain, but unfortunately um you know we've we've sacrifice you know millions of of mice to learn about our own brain um for therapeutics and treatments. Um so that kind of showed the focus of going very deep in a model organism to learn a lot whereas you could take a more of a buckshot approach and just try to study every um animal at once. Um, and I think we took this we took this approach of we went really really deep with one species and now we're coming up 5 years later with a lot of new understandings, a lot of new findings and noticing that a lot of these findings could be translated across other species. And um so it'll be much easier now to begin to kind of use this model of translation of non-human communication to others once the the kind of road map and um um and flag post exists which leads to the ultimate question which is where does this go in your mind? What do you this has been fi a fiveyear journey with a long antecedent before it. uh you're hitting an important inflection point. Where are you 5 years from now?

[00:30:28]>> That's a great question. Where are we want to be? I mean, the re the real motivation for me at the core of doing this project was was really related to climate change and and and the degradation that I witnessed personally of marine environments, you know, especially coral reefs. Like I would go back to corals that I'd studied several years ago and they would just be completely demolished and gone. And I had gotten to know those species that live on the reefs and those communities.

[00:30:57]And I felt like this was happening under the sea and so few humans kind of knew what was happening. And and it was very hard to kind of relay that message above the water um to people. So, I think that whales are they're really like a vector and a connector. They're this amazing magical animal that have the ability to captivate so many humans. And the real goal here is just like kind of posing the hypothesis, can technology bring us closer to the natural world? um these tools that some people are saying are going to lead to us all, you know, floating down the river into a cesspool together, can they be used in these really positive, magical ways? Um and and I think there's just a lot of whatifs here. So the goal of like where we want to be in 5 years is like a much deeper understanding. We're working deeply with NYU's school of laws more than human life program to think about the legal ramifications of this research. Like what will it mean if we could very accurately translate that the whales are being tortured by underwater noise? Um you know what will that mean in the legal system? Like how will will that be admissible? and also thinking about the guide rails like we're the first to be doing this but there's generations coming behind us much much like I'm the generation coming behind Roger Payne and how will they approach this and how will this be used so if this is approached in a kind of form of kindness and empathy and always asking the question like does this benefit the whale um it could be very beautiful and there's there's there's an author Karen Ber that wrote a book the sounds of life and and she was a close friend of mine who who unfortunately passed away untimely. Um you know kind of posing there's two roads we can take with this technologies. Um one could be a very connective um beautiful possibilities and some of them could be rather dark and dystopian. So, I think the goals here are to continue posing the beautiful possibilities that could happen. And um and that's that's kind of really the the the hope of the next 5 years is just continue our understanding and continue to get people engaged. And even the fact that you're asking Allan like what a whale might be saying like we're already feel that that's like a high degree of success that that that we're asking the question of what a whale might be saying and thinking.

[00:33:32]>> What I find amazing about your work is that you're not trying to in the caricature of that I've read in some of the interviews with you, you're not trying to figure you're not trying to figure out a way to talk to the whales.

[00:33:44]You're trying to figure out what are they saying to each other? How are they communicating? And that is a far more interesting question. It takes us the human out of the center. It's all about us and where you you're going with where you are with this and where you're going with this which has to be the approach to other species to other life forms uh perhaps to how we interact with the machines has to be to understand their communication as communication in and of itself not just relevant to us not relative to us.

[00:34:22]>> No, I love that. I I I completely agree.

[00:34:24]It kind of it reminds us a lot of like what Capernicus did um you know showing that we're not the center of the universe. The earth is not the center of the universe and and in this this is showing that we're we share a planet where there's other animals with really rich communication and communal lives.

[00:34:43]Um and we've just now are beginning to understand it. So, I think there's real treats in store for us, you know, and lessons um in and and I think some of them are going to be coming out um in the near future, including a witness we saw of um of a whale giving a sperm whale giving birth with um with the assistance of a of 11 um whales. and and thinking of the kind of care and collaboration and um coordination that that took for a fellow mammal to give birth to a newborn that would sink to the bottom of the ocean. Um and just the amount of effort and care and um and um that they that they showed there. So So yeah, I feel that's a really strong lesson that we could we could learn from.

[00:35:33]>> Uh absolutely amazing. I I think I can't imagine what we could add to to just the image that you created for us. So, thank you very much, David, for this conversation and and let's we will stay in touch over the years. I I want to I want to learn more as you learn more.

[00:35:49]Thank you.

[00:35:49]>> Thank you, Alan. Such a pleasure to be here. Thank you.

[00:35:54]>> Thank you for listening to this episode of New Thinking for [music] a New World.

[00:35:58]I'm Alan Stoga, podcast host, and I look forward to your joining our next conversation. Remember, tell us what you think at [music] telberfoundation.org.