animal bits

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Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds
Analysis shows whales’ coda vocalizations are ‘highly complex’ and remarkably similar to our own

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/sperm-whales-alphabet-vocalizations-similar-humans

We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered.

Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found.

Sperm whales communicate in a series of short clicks called codas. Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian.

The structure of the whales’ communication has “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution”, the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are “highly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system”, it added.

The findings are the latest discovery about the lives of sperm whales by Project Ceti (standing for Cetacean Translation Initiative), an organization that has studied whales off the coast of Dominica in an attempt to find out what they are saying. Last month, the project released video of a sperm whale giving birth while other whales supported it.

Until the 1950s, it was not clear to scientists that sperm whales even vocalized but modern technology, including artificial intelligence, is helping unlock the language of these creatures – with unexpected similarities to our own speech.

“I think it’s another humbling moment that we’re not the only species with rich, communicative, communal and cultural lives,” said David Gruber, founder and president of Project CETI.

“These whales could be passing information along generation to generation to generation for over 20 million years. Humans now are just having the right tools and desire to be able to look at whale voices in this way to see the complexity that has been there all along.”

Studying sperm whales can be challenging – they dive deep underwater for up to 50 minutes in search of squid to eat, only surfacing for 10 minutes at a time. But it’s near the surface where the animals “chit-chat”, as Gruber put it, with their heads close together.

“If you watch sperm whales, they put their heads right together and click into each other’s heads,” he said. “It’s like if you wanted to talk to someone about a Chaucer novel or something – you wouldn’t want to do that from opposite ends of a football stadium. You would want to get real close to have a real sophisticated conversation.”

That sperm whale conversation sounds, to our ears, little more than a staccato morse code. But by removing the gaps between the clicks, researchers were able to find patterns strikingly similar to human speech. Much like how we alter our vocal folds to change an “A” sound into an “E” sound, whales can manipulate vowel sounds into different meanings.

Gašper Beguš, a linguist at University of California, Berkeley who led the new paper, said that this level of complexity in sperm whale speech was beyond anything he had studied in other creatures, such as parrots and elephants, and highlights the parallels between our lives and those of the whales.

“They have very different lives to us – they’re not stuck to the ground all the time, they float in the water, they sleep vertically,” said Beguš.

“Yet you realize that there’s a lot that unifies us. They have grandmas, they babysit each other’s calves, they give collaborative births, they’re very loud during a birth and so on. It’s such a distant intelligence, but in many ways very relatable.”

The new study shows that “sperm whale communication isn’t just about patterns of clicks – it involves multiple interacting layers of structure,” said Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist at the Marine Mammal Institute who was not involved in the research. “With this study, we’re starting to see that these signals are organized in ways we didn’t fully appreciate before.”

The latest discovery around sperm whale speech has inched forward the possibility of someday fully understanding the creatures and even communicating with them. Project Ceti has set a goal of being able to comprehend 20 different vocalized expressions, relating to actions such as diving and sleeping, within the next five years.

Actually being able to fully grasp what the whales are saying, or being able to converse with them, is still a longer-term proposition, Gruber said, but not an outlandish one.

“It’s totally within our grasp,” he said. “We’ve already got a lot further than I thought we could. But it will take time, and funding. At the moment we are like a two-year-old, just saying a few words. In a few years’ time, maybe we will be more like a five-year-old.”

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The Lonely Camp

In the fall of 1948, the Idaho Department of Fish and Game loaded seventy-six live beavers into airplanes and parachuted them into the backcountry wilderness of the Chamberlain Basin. Every single beaver survived the drop.

The problem that led to this was straightforward. Idaho had too many beavers in the agricultural lowlands where they were damming irrigation ditches and flooding fields, and not enough beavers in the remote high-country watersheds where their dams would actually be useful for erosion control and water management. The obvious solution was relocation. Trap the nuisance beavers, move them to the backcountry, let them do what beavers do. The problem was getting them there.

The Chamberlain Basin is deep wilderness. No roads. No vehicle access. The standard method was to strap live beavers onto pack mules and ride them in over multi-day trail routes through the summer heat. A beaver is a forty-pound animal built for cold water. Its body is insulated with dense fur and a thick fat layer designed to maintain core temperature in near-freezing streams. That same insulation system works in reverse on a dry, hot trail. The beavers overheated on the pack animals and died in transit. The mortality rate was high enough that the relocation program was failing before it started.

An Idaho Fish and Game officer named Elmo Heter proposed an alternative that his supervisors probably thought was a joke until he demonstrated that it worked. He wanted to drop the beavers out of airplanes on surplus military parachutes.

Heter acquired a stockpile of rayon parachutes left over from World War II and engineered a wooden crate specifically for the job. The box was designed with a mechanical latch system that stayed clamped shut as long as the parachute lines were under tension during descent. The moment the crate hit the ground and the lines went slack, the latches released and the box fell apart, freeing the beaver. No human needed to be on the ground to open it. The beaver walked out on its own.

Before scaling the operation, Heter needed proof of concept. He selected a mature male beaver, named him Geronimo, loaded him into the crate, loaded the crate into a plane, and dropped him over an open airfield.

The parachute deployed. The crate descended. It hit the dirt. The latches released. Geronimo walked out into the grass and stood there. Uninjured. Not panicked. Heter loaded him back into the crate and dropped him again. Then again. Geronimo survived every test drop without a fracture, without visible distress, and apparently without holding it against anyone. A beaver’s skeleton is dense and compact, built to absorb impact from falling trees and collapsing bank dens. The fat layer that killed them on the pack mules functioned as shock absorption on landing. The animal was structurally overbuilt for exactly the kind of short, sharp impact that a parachute drop produces.

With the concept proven, the operation went live in the fall of 1948. Seventy-six beavers were loaded into twin-engine aircraft and dropped over the Chamberlain Basin in individual parachute crates. Geronimo went on the first flight, boxed with three young females. He hit the ground, walked out of the crate for the last time, and started working. Subsequent surveys by game wardens confirmed that Geronimo and the airdropped beavers had established functional dams on the local streams and built a permanent breeding colony in the basin.

Seventy-six beavers were thrown out of airplanes in wooden boxes on surplus military parachutes into roadless wilderness, and the operation had a near-perfect survival rate. One beaver died during the entire program when its crate opened prematurely in the air. Every other animal landed, walked out, and got to work. Heter published the results in the Journal of Wildlife Management in 1950. The paper includes a photograph of Geronimo exiting his crate on the airfield, looking exactly like a forty-pound rodent that has been dropped out of a plane multiple times and has no strong feelings about it.

Source: Idaho Department of Fish and Game Archives / “Transplanting Beavers by Airplane and Parachute” (Elmo Heter, 1950)