If A Whale Ever Calls You Back… DON'T REPLY

Southeast Alaska, August 2021. Scientists on a small research boat in Frederick Sound lowered an underwater speaker and played a recorded humpback whale call, a "whup", a kind of contact call. A whale named Twain came over, circled the boat, and called back. For about twenty minutes they went back and forth: 36 calls from her. In their paper the scientists called it "conversing", in quotation marks. Nobody on the boat knew what was said. That's the dream behind a lot of new AI projects: a translator for animals. This video shows why it's so hard, one level at a time. How a translation app learns French (the same text in two languages). Why animals give us no such worksheet. How babies find words in a stream of sound with no translator (Saffran, Aslin and Newport, 1996), and why the meaning part needs sound plus situation. Sperm whale codas from Dominica: Project CETI's 2024 study of 8,719 codas found more structure than expected, but nobody knows what they mean yet. Elephants that seem to have something like names (Pardo et al., 2024). The dolphin prizes. The word-map idea behind the Earth Species Project, and Wittgenstein's lion. On screen: a real spectrogram of a humpback call (NPS hydrophone, Glacier Bay), the real Dominica coda dataset (every dot is a real coda), a recreation of the 1996 syllable stream with a real count of which syllables follow which, and toy word maps where the best turn is computed for real. Sources Twain playback, Frederick Sound, 2021; 20 minutes, 36 calls; "conversing" in quotes; results called preliminary (McCowan et al., PeerJ 2023): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... Saffran, Aslin and Newport 1996, statistical learning in 8-month-olds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statist... Sharma et al. 2024, sperm whale codas (Nature Communications): https://www.nature.com/articles/s4146... Coda data (DominicaCodas.csv): https://github.com/pratyushasharma/sw... About 60 whales, "phonetic alphabet", meaning still unknown: https://www.news4jax.com/news/world/2... Codas may be more like music: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-... Elephant names, Pardo et al. 2024: https://elephantvoices.org/latest-new... Coller Dolittle Challenge 2025 dolphin award: https://www.whoi.edu/press-room/news-... Grand prize rules: https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.or... Earth Species Project: https://earthspecies.org/faq Word translation without parallel data (Conneau et al. 2017): https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.04087 Wittgenstein's lion: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ludwig_... Sperm whale diving and echolocation (NOAA): https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/specie... About the graphics: the playback rig, the whales, elephants, dolphins, babies and people are our drawings. The humpback spectrogram is a real NPS recording, not Twain's exact whup. The syllable stream is our recreation with made-up words like those in the study; its percentages are a real count on our stream. The coda rows are real data; the stretch, extra-click, matching and grid shots are our drawings of the idea. The word maps are toy maps. The field logs, the newspaper and the "17 elephants" rows are our mock-ups. Painted scenes are illustrations, not Twain. No free photos of Twain, the 1996 researchers, Shane Gero, Michael Pardo, Aza Raskin or Britt Selvitelle exist, so they appear as name cards. Photos and sound (Wikimedia Commons) Humpback fluke, Frederick Sound, 2023: USDA Forest Service, public domain Sperm whale mother and calf: Gabriel Barathieu, CC BY-SA 2.0 Soufrière Bay, Dominica: Postdlf, CC BY-SA 3.0 Elephant family, Amboseli: Regina Hart, CC BY 2.0 Elephants in Samburu: Daniel Case, CC BY-SA 4.0 Bottlenose dolphin: NOAA, public domain African grey parrot: Papooga, CC0 Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1930: Moritz Nähr, public domain Male lion, Maasai Mara: Smtunli, CC BY-SA 4.0 Humpback whale sounds, Glacier Bay hydrophone: U.S. National Park Service, public domain Icons: Material Design Icons (Apache 2.0). Chapters 0:00 Frederick Sound, 2021 0:23 Twain calls back 0:49 What did she say? 1:09 Level 1: how apps learn French 1:28 No worksheet for whales 1:37 Level 2: you did it too 2:07 Babies count patterns 2:22 Sound plus situation 2:49 Level 3: sperm whales 3:22 A "phonetic alphabet"? 3:46 Letters, but no words yet 4:08 Level 4: names 4:45 The dolphin prizes 5:06 Level 5: a map of words 5:48 The twist: Wittgenstein's lion 6:12 "I'm fine" 6:41 Here I am