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STORY: ::Project CETI

This is what it sounds like when sperm whales communicate.

Those bursts of clicking noises are called codas. It's sounds a bit like Morse code.

New research has found their system of communication is more sophisticated than once thought... and even has some similarities to human language.

:: National Geographic Society/Pristine Seas

Like all marine mammals, sperm whales are very social animals.

:: Amanda Cotton / Project CETI

Their calls are an integral part of this.

Using traditional statistical analysis and artificial intelligence, researchers examined calls made by about 60 whales.

They found the vocalizations exhibit a complex internal structure and seemingly even a “phonetic alphabet.”

Researchers also identified similarities to aspects of other animal communication systems, including those used by humans.

“Whales don't produce arbitrary sequences of clicks. They instead intend to produce them in one of a relatively limited set of fixed patterns.”

MIT Professor Jacob Andreas is one of the researchers working on Project CETI.

“So on one hand, you have pictographic systems like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, where every word is associated with a different kind of unique picture, and there aren't actually relationships between them. And on the other hand, you have alphabetic systems like English, where there's a much smaller set of pieces that we call letters, that combine to produce all the different words that we see, written down. And so one way of thinking about what we're doing in this new paper, is showing that sperm whale codas are more like an alphabetic system than a pictographic system, which was kind of the picture that we had before.”

Sperm whales, which can reach about 60 feet long and are the largest of the toothed whales, also have the largest brain of any animal.

Researchers found variations in the number, rhythm and tempo of the clicks produced different types of codas.

The whales alter the duration of the codas and sometimes add an extra click at the end, like a suffix in human language.

But what exactly are the whales talking about?

MIT's Andreas says they're still trying to figure that part out.

“What makes that problem challenging is to link this structure that we're finding to meaning you really need to figure out how the sounds that the whales are producing ground out in their behavior and in their social dynamics."

"And so a big part of the larger Project CETI effort here, is to actually get that behavioral data paired with communication data in order to answer these deeper questions about what it is that the whales are saying."