Scottish scientist uncovers astonishing evidence that whales 'talk'

A solitary humpback whale off the coast of western Australia can begin singing a unique song which soon sweeps across the entire Pacific, with every other humpback copying the “hit tune”. 

It’s just been discovered that bowhead whales in the High Arctic have repertoires of 180 songs. Such is the complexity of the way these unique creatures communicate, they could finally provide the answer to one of the greatest questions in modern science: do whales really have “language”?

Whatever is happening deep beneath the waves, we can be sure that cetaceans – whales, dolphins and orcas – are definitely communicating. To discover if whales have ‘language’, I sat down with Dr Luke Rendell from St Andrews University’s School of Biology. He is a global expert in how cetaceans communicate and “the evolution of learning”. 

His work is astonishing. Some of Rendell’s findings, quite literally, leave you open-mouthed. After our discussion, Rendell was back at sea carrying out research. He’s regularly in the Caribbean, the Galapagos and the Azores, but I caught up with him during a sojourn on land.

Dr Luke Rendell from St Andrews University

TRIBE

Let’s start with his favourite subject: sperm whales. Most people don’t think that these majestic creatures live in waters off Mallorca, but a small group do. Some 20,000 years ago, there was an “invasion event” when a group of sperm whales entered the western Mediterranean. They became “a lost tribe”, says Rendell. 

Today’s Balearic sperm whales “all seem to descend from the same maternal lineage and they all share one common vocal dialect”. Across the rest of the oceans, sperm whales have “multiple, vocal dialects”.

Rendell is loath to use the word “language”, which comes with distinctly human notions of “syntax and grammar”. However, studying how cetaceans communicate can give clues to the evolution of human language.

Understanding what’s going on in whale “society” – for they do have societies, Rendell explains – will unravel secrets about our own deep past. Curiously, our closest cousins – apes like chimpanzees – “don’t have some of the elements clearly associated with human language”, and so have much less sophisticated powers of communication than our more distant mammalian relatives, the whales. 

Sperm whales, Rendell explains, use vocal clicks in specific “social contexts”. For example, in the eastern tropical Pacific among different sperm whale groups “some share a dialect – they make similar types of click patterns – and some don’t, some would have different types of click patterns”.

There is no “physical barrier” between them – they’re in the same part of the sea. “It suggests,” says Rendell, “that they’re learning their own dialect selectively.”

Each whale in a specific group “acquires the click patterns of their group”. Now, matters get even more curious when these small groups meet up with other groups and form bigger groups. “What I’ve shown is that sperm whales only form bigger groups with others that share the same vocal dialect.”

It appears to be this shared “dialect” which brings groups together, even though “they might not actually have met each other ever before”. When these small groups recognise each other through dialect “they go about the world for a short period a time” together, and find potential “suitable partners”. 

It’s an analogy which may annoy a scientist like Rendell, but in human terms, imagine one giant speed-date among people who share the same regional accent.

 

CLANS

THE structure of sperm whale society “isn’t geographic, it’s social, based on these vocal dialects”. Rendell calls these groups “vocal clans”.

However, the big question is: do these “dialects” have meaning? For now, “meaning is a very difficult thing to extract”. But there is information in the signals. The hypothesis is that these vocal patterns are about “identity”. Whales are “saying” they “belong to a particular vocal clan”. 
So, right there, we have both society and communication in the whale world.

The clicks “function as an identity at an individual level”, and as a “collective identity”. From one whale to another, the sounds might be “saying” – if that’s the right word – “that somewhere back in the past, we share some maternal ancestor as we have this shared vocal dialect”. The scientific name for these click patterns – these vocal dialects – is a “coda”. It’s important to remember that term.

Just as human language keeps evolving over centuries and millennia – think of the difference in Old English to modern English – whale dialects are also believed to “evolve and change over time”.

This would explain the different dialects of different whale groups, from the same species, all around the world.

In the Pacific, there are 13 “vocal clans from Japan to South America. Some have big ranges, some have small ranges”. However, what’s fascinating is “the more the ranges of these clans overlap, the more different their primary coda pattern”.

In other words, the closer clans are together, the more different the dialect. “When different clans come into contact” their dialects become “more distinct from each other”.

Is he saying this is similar to the difference between something like French and English? Rendell certainly won’t go that far, but he does compare it to football, of all things. His analogy is this: “You wouldn’t know a Rangers or Celtic fan until you saw the colour of their shirt.” 

So, it could be that whales are communicating “ethnic markers” to one another. “I think most of the meaning is wrapped up in identity,” Rendell adds.

Is it a bit like me saying “Hi, I’m Neil, from Scotland which is in Europe”? “Yes,” Rendell replies, “that’s right.” That’s an astonishing notion in itself – that whales have a sense of individual and shared “identity”.

Whales with “shared coda” – similar dialects – also “engage in chorusing bouts, where they seem to co-ordinate the production of the codas. It’s very rhythmic”. The codas share “the same tempo”. 

 

SINGING

SO they’re “singing” together. But why? Rendell hypothesises it is “to establish and maintain social bonds”.

He speculates that this may have a similar psychological function to humans singing together in choirs, or playing together in bands. In early human societies, music is often “associated with rituals, which you could argue are about bonding the group together”.

Rendell wonders if there’s “common roots” between human music and “the process of sperm whales chorusing together to perhaps produce a psychological connection”. He adds: “The stuff that we’re getting out of vocal communication really makes a case for looking at music as a route of co-operation in human societies.”

Music makes humans “feel good” about each other, especially in groups. If whales “feel good” about each other, Rendell says, it’s more likely they’ll protect each other if predators like killer whales attack. 

Whales also need to depend on the group to care for calves. Adults dive to depths for food which their young can’t reach, so while mother whale is away foraging the group provides “co-operative parenting”. A bit like kindergarten for working mums.

The dialects of different whale clans are so distinct that Rendell can spot which group a specific whale belongs to simply by hearing its coda. Groups of sperm whales with the same coda have never been seen associating with other groups with different codas. “They must be making decisions to avoid that happening.” Codas can be heard from around four kilometres at sea – which leaves plenty of room to avoid the neighbours.

If one group hears a coda that’s the same as their own from another group, they often chose to “approach and intermingle”. It’s a sort of sperm whale clan gathering. 

In the Caribbean, whales from groups linked to one vocal clan stay in and around Dominica and Grenada, while whales from groups linked to another vocal clan are found in St Vincent and Martinique. “They’re dividing the habitat.”

Humpback Whale, Magdalena Bay, Pacific coast, Baja California, Mexico

BORDERS

RENDELL really doesn’t like anthropomorphism – attributing human traits to animals – but it’s hard for the average person not to see a link here to borders built up around nations with shared languages. 

Whales, after all, can attack each other, and borders are a way of saying “don’t cross or there’ll be trouble”. However, it’s more likely about “confining your co-operative acts to groups that are signalling they share some common background through their vocal dialect”.

Rendell adds: “Dialects are very much an element of human language which I think we’ve found in sperm whales. People from different places develop different ways of talking, even within the same language, and you can identify very clearly their background on the basis of that.”

I’m Northern Irish and Rendell suggests what’s happening with sperm whales is similar to me wandering the streets of a foreign country where I know nobody and suddenly hearing a Belfast accent. I’d be immediately drawn to them.

Humpback whales are even more intriguing than sperm whales. In terms of communication, they seem to exhibit complex “social learning, leading to the transmission of entire songs between populations”. 

A “new” whale song which begins in western Australia will move through the entire population of Pacific whales and eventually be “sung” by whales off the coast of South America. It’s called a “revolution event”. 

Rendell adds: “A new song comes along and it just invades the whole population and everyone starts singing it. It’s a bit like when the Beatles went to America and instantaneously everyone starts singing that song.

“You get this astonishing pattern of cultural waves of song going west to east across the Pacific – repeatedly.”

By the time the song reaches French Polynesia, he says, a new one will have started in Australia. The songs are complex, lasting up to 30 minutes, and “consist of a series of themes. The theme is made up of a repetition of a series of phrases with slight variation”.

Rendell says the repetition “probably helps them remember the sequence, a bit like traditional music”, where “the key phrase” is often repeated. “We have this amazing phenomenon of animals learning songs from each other, and these waves of songs travelling vast distances.”

The humpback song is more complex that the sperm whale codas. It may be to do with mating. Indeed, whale song is often gender specific. In humpbacks, only males sing, in sperm whales it’s the female.

Rendell says that when it comes to humpback communication “it’s more like music than language. The structure of it looks like music”. Even though the same song can sweep an entire population, each whale “sings it in individually distinctive ways”. 

Rendell’s colleague Dr Ellen Garland – an expert on humpbacks who is central to these discoveries – is trying to work out if there are links between “song and paternity success”. In other words, “if you’re successful as a father, does that relate to the song you were singing that year”. Does the Elvis of humpbacks get all the girls? That’s the question.

Sometimes new songs start, just aren’t popular, and die out. That’s a one-hit wonder. Although we’re only beginning to understand what’s happening here with humpbacks, it’s certainly communication.

Dr Luke Rendell

NAMES

DOLPHINS are also communicating in intriguing ways. Bottlenose dolphins each have a “signature whistle”. The whistle “identifies” each animal. Not only that, dolphins can make the signature whistle of other dolphins they know. “There’s a sense in which they’re able to address specific individuals by mimicking their signature whistles.”

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion, says Rendell, that these are dolphin “names”, but we can’t be sure yet of what those whistles mean. 

We do know that dolphins use this whistle to build “alliances” beyond their immediate group. Rendell’s colleague, Professor Stephanie King at Bristol University, has done experiments which show that when dolphins hear the whistle of a distant “ally” they respond, but when they hear the whistle of a “non-allied” dolphin they don’t.

When they hear an allied whistle: “It’s a bit like they look around and go, ‘oh, OK, Bob is here’, and if it’s not an alliance member they’re like ‘oh, it’s somebody else, I’m not interested’.”

Brace yourself, though, as we’re about to meet the most mysterious cetacean of all, the bowhead. Studying these creatures may one day unravel the answer to the question: do whales really have “language”? 

Incredibly, bowheads “regularly live longer than 200 years”. Harpoons found in the blubber of some bowheads which died recently were dated to the 1850s. These remarkable creatures each have a repertoire of 180 songs. 

So, is that getting close to language? Rendell’s cautious and understandably very scientific response is: “Well, you need diversity to have the range of signals which make a language. That’s all we know.” 

It wasn’t until 2018 that the huge range in bowhead communication was uncovered, so we’re still at the early stages of discovering what’s going on. There have only been “three or four” academic papers so far.

Rendell is off to Oregon on America’s Pacific Northwest coast to study bowheads soon. Are the number of songs bowheads “know” linked to their lifespan? “It’s an interesting question, but challenging to answer when the species you’re studying lives longer than you.”

Certainly, whales have “culture”, Rendell says – even if the question about language remains open. Whales and dolphins display “social learning and cultural transmission from older generations to newer ones”. He adds: “In the same way, it would be impossible for humans to function as adults in society if they didn’t have that cultural input at crucial times. The same is true of whales and dolphins.”

LEARNING

SO, for example, killer whales reintroduced to the oceans haven’t learned from their elders and so “don’t know how to survive. The famous case of Free Willy ultimately ended in tragedy”.

Killer whales also have different dialects. For instance, there’s a group called the Southern Resident population near British Columbia. They are endangered as they specialise in eating salmon and human activity is reducing their food source.

They have a different dialect to, say, other orcas specialising in eating stingrays around New Zealand. So, “knowing what to eat and how to catch it for killer whales is really important. We have strong evidence that’s culturally determined”.

It might infuriate the scientist in Rendell but you can’t help thinking of analogies with humans – like how only Scots eat haggis, or the French eat frogs’ legs. Our culture often determines our tastes, and we share those tastes with our group, along with our language.

It seems matriarchal orcas “teach” other killer whales where to find the best hunting spots. Like humans, female orcas go through the menopause and continue to live long after their reproductive years are over. In evolutionary terms, this relieves pressure on food resources for the young – as older females cease reproducing. However, wisdom also comes with age. 

There’s evidence that older females take the lead, Rendell says, when it comes to passing on knowledge like “the timing of salmon runs”. Killer whales, he adds, “have given rise to one of the most convincing explanations for menopause in humans that we have”.

In cetaceans, “distinct sorts of behaviour and vocal behaviour” can be used to “identify specific communities, in the way that we’d identify cultures in human society”. Rendell uses the difference in Unionist and Republican culture in Northern Ireland as his own analogy here.

When it comes to the Doctor Dolittle notion of animals having language like humans, we need to make sure our pride doesn’t get in the way of our sense. Why should, Rendell asks, “evolution be a ladder going unidirectionally and linearly towards this ideal of human language? That’s anthropocentrism, and it’s unfortunate as all animal lineages are evolving like a tree in all directions, responding to the needs they have”.

However, it does seem that “vocal learning is more common in more mobile species”. Evidently, whales are highly mobile, like our human ancestors. 

When it comes to humans, the big question we want to unravel – by studying other creatures like cetaceans – is “which came first: human culture or human language”?

Rendell says it’s a “chicken and egg situation”. The key to human success is what’s called “cumulative culture”. In other words, we don’t just invent the aeroplane and leave it at that – we then invent the jetliner and that’s followed by the Moon rocket. Gunpowder becomes the atomic bomb. Human knowledge builds up year after year for millennia after millennia, and communication is key to passing on the necessary information.

“Did language spark the evolution of the brain, or did we get big brains for other reasons that then led to language?” Rendell ponders.

Evidently, there are specialist forms of communication in other animals. Babbler birds make calls which let their chicks know food is available – so information is assuredly being passed on in that instance. 

Most other animals communicate by sound in specific scenarios – such as to express fear, pain, defence or warning. Seagulls make an incredible racket if predators are near. Dogs bark, cats miaow, snakes hiss and cows moo. Some fish make noise seemingly to attract mates or deter competitors.

 

EVOLUTION

CREATURES long dead communicated. Dinosaurs were able to vocalise. Making sound is almost universal in evolutionary terms. Even insects make noise – like the stridulations of crickets. “Virtually anywhere information can be used or where influence can be exerted, then you’re likely to see some kind of communication system evolving.”

Rendell isn’t much taken by those who believe cracking the secret of whether cetaceans have “language” will one day help us communicate with extraterrestrials. There’s a fad for this idea at the moment. “It’s a bit California New Agey, wave-your-arms stuff,” he says. Extraterrestrials, if they exist, “will literally come from another planet so they could have ways of communicating we can’t even imagine”.

Might animals on Earth also have ways of communicating we haven’t discovered? Maybe, he thinks. Perhaps “electric signals we haven’t detected yet”. But that doesn’t bother him much. There are still huge discoveries to be made about what our distant mammal cousins, the cetaceans beneath the waves, are saying.

“I suspect we’re going to find astonishing things,” he adds. “Not all the codas the sperm whale makes are its identity codas, not all the whistles dolphins make are its signature whistles, not all the sounds humpbacks make are songs.”

These are just the most easy sounds – so far – to study. “We’ve gone for the low-hanging fruit.”
The biggest risk to future discovery is climate change. The animals Rendell studies are in clear risk of rising sea temperatures destroying their habitats.

Their “intelligence” – or “cultural capabilities” – means they might be able to survive by moving habitat or targeting new food sources should the worst happen. But already the Vaquita porpoise in the Gulf of Mexico is “functionally extinct”. The North Atlantic right whale “is on a knife-edge”.

That “lost tribe” of sperm whales off the Balearics could die out as the Mediterranean heats up.
“However, the oceans are very big. I have hope they’ve the resilience and flexibility to adapt,” Rendell says.

And it’s not just human climate change that’s harming whales. Remember that beaching of dozens of pilot whales on the Isle of Lewis last year? That was down to the Navy exploding bombs underwater. Maritime sonar is another beaching risk. However, the rise in beachings could also be a sign there are plenty of whales in the sea – which is “a good thing”, Rendell adds.

The holy grail for Rendell is inventing a small phone-sized computer that he can place on a whale for an entire year. At the moment, devices only stay attached for 48 hours. Now just imagine what wonders Rendell might uncover about “the language of whales” if such a gizmo existed? You can’t help but wish he’d invent it right away.

SCOTLAND’S SEAS: WHERE 'FISH FARTS' AND DEEP SEA SEX TALK WERE DISCOVERED

IT’S not just whales and dolphins filling the seas with sound. Fish are pretty noisy too.

In her fascinating new book ‘Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water’, the science writer Amorina Kingdon tells the story of how it was in Scotland where the sounds of fish having sex was first discovered.

In the 1960s, the government wanted to know if the sounds boats made were “bothering fish”. Researcher Tony Hawkins got the job. He later became director of Fisheries Research Services at Aberdeen Marine Laboratory.

Hawkins was hired as he and a colleague had been the first to record the sounds of the humble haddock in captivity. Hawkins and his team went out on Loch Torridon, and used tiny devices to study “how various species moved in response to the sound of fishing boats”.

Hawkins, however, ended up discovering how sound was integral to the sex life of haddock.

During spawning, males live on the seabed. Female are in midwater. The males make sound and the females “listen” and “swim down to the males whose sounds attract them”. They then take part in a long courtship, during which Hawkins discovered that the “male makes a series of increasingly rapid knocks”. The male then “embraces” the female, and they fall silent as “she releases the eggs and he releases the sperm”.

The sound appears to help in “coordinating their movements to ensure they release their gametes at the same time”. A paper by Hawkins on this ended up on the cover of Nature in 1967.

“Fish sounds - fish communications - are a window into lives,” says Kingdon. “They can help us understand what a fish wants and how it’s trying to get it.”

Kingdon also tells the story of biologists working around Shetland and how herring use a peculiarly specific type of noise to elude the predations of killer whales. When herring detect orcas “they empty their swim bladder, in the quickest way they can - a fart - and sink”. The swim bladder controls buoyancy meaning the fish can move out of the way, but the sound also distracts the hungry Orca, throwing off its use of echolocation.

“This strategic fart,” says Kingdon, “shifts them deeper and makes them less reflective to sound.”