![]() The Save the Whales movement took off soon after. They did, by releasing an album, Songs of the Humpback Whale, that made these singing whales famous. Watlington thought the sounds were from humpback whales. ![]() For centuries, sailors had recounted tales of eerie songs that emanated from their boats’ wooden hulls, whether from monsters or sirens they didn’t know. On a trip to Bermuda, the biologists Roger and Katy Payne met a US naval engineer named Frank Watlington, who gave them recordings he’d made of strange melodies captured deep underwater. Then, something remarkable happened: We heard whales sing. In the 1960s, 700,000 whales were killed, marking the peak of cetacean death. The American whaling industry in the mid-19th century, and then the global whaling industry in the following century, very nearly obliterated several species, resulting in one of the largest-ever losses of wild animal life caused by humans. They saw whales as floating containers of blubber and baleen. And just as engineers today don’t need to know Mandarin or Turkish to build a chatbot in those languages, it will soon be possible to build one that speaks Humpback-or Hummingbird, or Bat, or Bee.Ĭommercial whalers had a different approach. In 30 years, they say, nature documentaries won’t need soothing Attenborough-style narration, because the dialog of the animals onscreen will be subtitled. The nonprofit’s mission is to open human ears to the chatter of the entire animal kingdom. ![]() And they’re not just planning to emulate a humpback’s voice. ![]() Fournet has shared her catalog of humpback calls with the Earth Species Project, a group of technologists and engineers who, with the help of AI, are aiming to develop a synthetic whup. If a whale recognizes the voice of the whale in the recording, how does that affect its response? Does it talk to a buddy differently than it would to a stranger? As a biologist, how do you ensure you’re sending out a neutral whup? The method is imperfect, though, because humpbacks are highly attentive to who they’re talking to. Fournet’s playbacks have so far used recordings of real whups. To our meager human ears, it sounds something like a belly rumble punctuated by a water droplet: whup.īiologists use this type of experiment, called a playback, to study what prompts an animal to speak. The whales have huge and diverse vocabularies, but there is one thing they all say, whether male or female, young or old. To do that, she needed to learn how to listen to them.įournet, now a professor at the University of New Hampshire and the director of a collective of conservation scientists, has spent the past decade building a catalog of the various chirps, shrieks, and groans that humpbacks make in daily life. Just as Fournet had discovered nature, then, she was witnessing it recede. The whales had fallen silent amid the racket. ![]() What if she could hear what they were saying? She dropped a hydrophone in the water-but the only sound that came through was the mechanical churn of boats. The humpbacks she was getting to know revealed themselves in partial glimpses. Later, as a graduate student in marine biology, Fournet wondered what else she was missing. “I didn’t even know I was bereft,” she recalls. For her entire life, she realized, the natural world had been out there, and she’d been missing it. She took a job on a whale watching boat and, each day she was out on the water, gazed at the grand shapes moving under the surface. Before Michelle Fournet moved to Alaska on a whim in her early twenties, she’d never seen a whale. ![]()
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