Is there bullying in the ocean?

Yes.

Do you ever see animals just messing with other animals

and hurting other animals just for the sake of hurting them?

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, Brenda, no.

I'm Mick Ebeling, founder and CEO of Not Impossible Labs.

For the past 15 years, we've been on a mission

to change the world through technology and story

by addressing societal problems

to improve the lives of everyone.

With a crew of engineers, hackers, entrepreneurs,

technologists, storytellers, and artists,

we've tackled and solved

some of the world's most incredible challenges.

But here's the thing,

we're just a small team in Venice Beach.

The world is full of people making the impossible possible.

My goal now with this podcast is to find these people,

share their stories, and hopefully, together,

we can keep pushing the limits of what's possible.

On today's episode, we talk to the SETI team

who's figured out a way to communicate with whales

in hopes of learning how to one day talk to aliens.

If whales have sentences,

then maybe we can finish a sentence.

If we're not detecting things out in space,

then we can't even understand

what animals in our own oceans are saying.

Is there a perceptual gap?

We do know that animals eavesdrop on each other.

Animal eavesdropping,

that's gonna be a whole new podcast episode for us.

What's that?

I would like to welcome everybody to the podcast.

I am joined with,

I'm gonna have each of you

just give a quick introduction to yourself,

just your name, rank, serial number,

mother's maiden name, social security, the usual stuff

so that the public will be able to

do any type of identity theft

that is just typical in things like this.

But we can go through that

and then we'll get into the conversation.

So we'll start, I'll just call it out.

Lisa, let's start with you

because in my Brady Bunch squares, I see you at the top.

Hi, my name is Lisa Walker.

I am a whale song theorist.

I take my background in music and composition

and apply it to understanding the vocalizations

of the humpback whale.

Fred.

Yeah, my primary interest is in behavioral ecology

and working with the humpbacks in the field

to answer both curiosity-driven questions

about their social structure and meaning of their acoustics

as well as conservation-based initiatives.

Jodi.

Yes, I am a marine photographer

and I have been studying

and observing humpback whale behavior

for about 24 years now,

both on the breeding grounds and the feeding grounds.

And prior to that was trained animals

and worked with animal behavior.

So I'm interested in the whole ball of wax.

Josephine.

So I am a animal behaviorist

and postdoctoral scholar at UC Davis,

really interested in animal behavioral flexibility

and cognition.

And Brenda.

Hi, I'm Brenda McCowan.

I'm a professor of animal behavior

at the University of California, Davis

and the California National Primate Research Center.

And my area of expertise is in biobehavioral complexity

and specifically looking at animal communication

and social dynamics in a number of different species,

including humpback whales.

Incredible.

Why is it important to understand what animals,

just we'll talk macro,

what animals are communicating?

Why is that important?

Well, we share the world with these beings

and they're remarkable in their own right.

They're also parts of natural integrated ecological systems

that sustain us and sustain the planet.

And so making sure that their wellbeing

is addressed as much as our own

will I think assist with long-term planet survivability.

I also see other non-human animals as being our comrades

and that by understanding them better,

we will better understand ourselves.

On August 18th, a group of nine whales

and correct me if I'm wrong,

tell me if I've got this correct,

but on, oh, all right.

Jody is even putting a hand up right now.

I didn't even get past the date.

Well, I'm only saying-

This is the correct me if you're wrong section

and I didn't even get correct me if I,

I didn't even finish that before she slapped me down.

This is because I, well, I tried to be quiet about it.

I did my homework.

I went back and I looked at my fluke photos

and an assessment or identification of the whales

that was done by somebody else who was on the voyage.

And we identified five different whales.

We told you nine, that's on us, not on you.

Okay, all right, no problem.

I thought you were gonna say,

hey, they weren't whales actually.

It was impersonators.

James Cameron was shooting an underwater avatar

and I was like, oh, the whole thing's blown.

All right, so on August 18th, 2021,

you recorded a questionable number of whales

that have yet to be proved,

but Jody says it's five whales,

one of whom was named Twain.

And on August 19th, you played back a recording

of what's called a whoop call.

A whoop call is a low frequency sound

humpback whales use to stay in touch.

It's how they contact each other across distances.

That you had recorded the day before

through hydrophones that you dropped into the water.

That was about three miles

from where the original recording was.

And one Twain, one whale,

then approached the boat and responded to the whoop call.

And you replayed that now,

I think it was 33 times over a period of 20 minutes

and Twain responded every single time.

So is this, let's just start,

because it's called not impossible.

Transition from impossible to not impossible.

Was this the first time that this had happened

where there was some type of call and response action

that we had had with humpback whales?

Yes.

There have been a variety of other types of playbacks

done to both humpback whales and other bathing whales.

Oftentimes playback studies will just use

a static predetermined set of what we call exemplars

or outgoing sounds.

Those sounds are not varied depending on the information

that is coming back from the animal.

A static approach is basically playing prerecorded sounds.

The real breakthrough, a dynamic approach.

They adjusted the sounds in real time

and Twain in response adjusted her replies.

It's amazing that with just three computers,

one to record, one to tweak sounds,

and one for playback,

we can create real whale interactions.

And so being able to engage these animals

in this extended interaction bodes well for the future

because it means the animals can using an acoustic modality

sort of get interested in the human signals

and be present with you for this 20 minute period.

So you recorded a whale saying something

and then you played it back.

How do we not know that someone wasn't saying like,

hey, you got a little krill on your cheek

and you might need to wipe it off

or some other thing that was being said?

Well, because the whoops are often recorded

when the animals are dispersed over a wide area,

we believe often by singletons.

So it suggests it's one of these calls

that's out of context,

that there's some distance between the animals.

So again, that suggested it sort of operates

like a contact call.

So we were just sort of expecting with the playback

is to get animals returning back their vocalization

every so often.

We weren't necessarily expecting

to have a more extended interaction.

I just want to add one thing is that

when you record something

and then make it into a picture, like a spectrogram,

you can see that the whoop call is very clearly defined.

It has this low growl component and then an upsweep.

So it can shift in frequency,

but when you see it on the spectrogram,

you can identify it as the whoop call.

And many, many contact calls are structured that way

in terms of spanning a number of frequencies,

it makes it highly localizable.

So the animals know where each other are.

So we're not entirely sure exactly

what the function of that call is,

but there's a lot of consensus as Fred has just said

that it's probably some type of contact call.

It seems like it's a giant game of animal Marco Polo, right?

They're yelling out Marco, someone else says Polo,

oh, Bruce is over there, Twain's over there,

Shania is behind me, da-da-da-da,

we got that, we have a way to sonar,

I'm not going to say sonar, but to,

with an audio function,

we're able to identify where people are.

Right, it provides a map, right?

It provides a map of where individuals are.

We think there's individual variation,

Fred, you can speak to this more than I can,

but I think it's starting to be shown

that there's individual variation in these calls as well

that could be used to identify particular individuals.

So yeah, it's kind of,

I mean, I've actually used that analogy before.

It's a little bit like a Marco Polo thing that went on.

It just said it was done within a hundred meters of our boat

with an animal circling our boat, which was very unusual.

And with the animal being present the day before

when we recorded the exemplar

and then showing up several miles

from the location we had recorded it the day before

and coming over to our boat as we played it back to her.

And it may be that either it was herself

that produced that call

or it was a group member in that group that day

because it was recorded from that group that she was in.

And just like anybody who is familiar

with a friend's voice,

it may be that she was responding

because it was something that she was familiar with.

So-

Or Brenda, everyone hates the sound

of their own voice on their voicemail

or she was just really pissed off

that you guys were playing her voice

over and over and over again.

But if she was pissed off,

then why at the end of the experiment

with under our permit requirements,

we had to stop issuing the exemplar,

she kept on vocalizing.

She kept talking.

She, for three more vocalizations,

as she swam off, she was whooping back to us.

I think that we saw that.

That is so special that she was doing that.

So I'm gonna say that you wasn't,

you didn't piss her off

that you would use your own voice.

I'm gonna say just because of that,

it was one of her friends.

And maybe one of her friends

was saying something nice about her too.

So, you know, we'll never know.

You are part of,

I don't know if I describe it as a team

or it's part of a thinking called SETI.

SETI stands for Search

for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

So somehow along the way,

this conversation has gone from,

wait, we're not just communicating to whales,

but this is part of a higher purpose

about extraterrestrial intelligence.

Say more about SETI,

say more about the purpose of SETI

and say more about

if you could just teach us the secret handshake

so that at least we could know that

before we get off the call.

Yeah, it's pretty exciting

and if that's actually how this team initially formed,

realizing that if like,

if we're not detecting things out in space,

but yet we can't even understand

what animals in our own oceans are saying,

I mean, is there perceptual gaps

in our ability to detect extraterrestrial life?

And we can be awash in electromagnetic signals

that contain information about life-bearing sender,

but we're just not cued into it yet.

Whoa, hold up.

Fred just threw out a wild theory.

Basically, the search for intelligent life

beyond our planet might actually start right here on Earth.

What if aliens have been trying to talk to us for years,

but we just don't have the tech

or understanding to recognize it?

I mean, we can't even figure out

how most animals on our planet communicate,

so what makes us think

that we'd understand extraterrestrials?

Take whales, for example.

They talk to each other across miles of ocean.

Kinda sounds like something an alien would do, right?

And as we look to Earth

and see all this amazing diversity of intelligence

and the diversity of communication

and the diversity of ecological niches

that animals are exploiting,

I would say that there almost statistically

has to be life out there somewhere.

It just seems that the mathematics are in favor

of us potentially discovering

some sort of alien civilization.

And so the lessons that we can draw from,

like, let's say, listening to humpback acoustics,

how do they propagate sound over long distances?

And one thing that they do

is they have very large silences

between their vocalizations and, let's say, their song.

How can we use that as a template

to potentially construct a communication system

with these extraterrestrials that one day we hope to meet?

Do you think that we have the opportunity

in the delving into understanding to learn from them,

not just to be curious about what they're saying,

but to actually get insights

into things that we're trying to discover?

We have discovered a lot in the last 50 or 60 years

about how complex these animals are.

We didn't think animals had culture

until the 1970s and 80s.

They do.

We are seeing complex communication systems.

Greta, what do you mean by culture?

When you say we didn't know they had culture,

what do you mean?

Variation in behavioral patterns

across different populations,

something that Josie's interested in,

like, for example, the behavioral flexibility

of changing the way you do things

based upon your environment

and who you're interacting with.

So that's what I mean by culture.

It actually fits the definition,

but we've spent a lot of time

separating humans from other animals,

and yet we find that there are a lot of similarities,

even if we're evolutionary divergent.

And I think what's important to add there

is that, of course, we can,

to bring that community together

to try to understand what parallels there might be

across animals is super valuable,

but also each animal evolves in a different environment,

and of course their abilities and communication systems

are adapted for those environments.

So we have to keep in mind

both their similarities and differences

when we're trying to make strides in animal communication.

Have you seen or studied the ability for animals,

different types of animals

being able to communicate with each other?

That's a good question.

I haven't studied that particularly.

My focus has been on how the definition of flexibility,

behavioral flexibility,

being able to adjust your behavior

to match your environment.

So a lot of my doctoral thesis work

focused on how urban animals,

primates in particular, non-human primates,

can adjust to coexist with people

and how it affects their natural behavior.

What I will say is that we do know

that animals eavesdrop on each other

and they gain information from others

that can be beneficial.

So that's a whole section of research

that we can talk about.

You gotta say more about that.

Animal eavesdropping.

That's gonna be a whole new podcast episode for us.

What's that?

Yeah, it's really cool.

The idea that, for example,

if there is a threat in the environment

and one bird sends off an alarm call,

like what Brenda was talking about earlier,

other birds can hear that alarm call

and know that if they have a similar shared threat

that they should be-

I'd like to jump in with a couple of examples.

Brenda had mentioned alarm calls

and Josie just talked about that.

And that's, to me,

been one of the more fascinating studies

I haven't observed it personally,

but Con Slobodchikoff studied this

and found that they had specific calls,

i.e. like a noun for each potential predator.

So a hawk would have one call,

a wolf would have another call,

a dog would have a different one,

a human might have one.

And then as they began to parse this out

without the help of AI,

they found that they had identifiers

for the speed at which the predator was moving

or the color of the predator.

So it appears that they included adjectives

and adverbs in their communications.

As we wrap it up,

what are your hopes and dreams

in terms of what you see in the near

and maybe not so near future

in terms of how this,

your ability to communicate with whales progresses?

So I think what we learned from this experiment,

because I mean, we all know it was an N of one,

a single example of this kind of dynamic exchange

in a very simplistic way,

because all we could change

was the timing of the playback

and see how she responded by matching temporally to that,

is to actually develop a system

where we can more adaptively and dynamically

change what we're playing back in real time.

So that maybe if whales have sentences,

again in quotes, just like conversing,

then maybe we can finish a sentence

by understanding the patterns

of their own communication system

and then using that in this dynamic adaptive playback way.

I think that's what we hope to do in the future.

Obviously with care,

we wanna make sure that we're not doing anything harmful

to the whales or any other species for that matter

in these kinds of playback experiments.

I just wanted to say, thank you.

We are huge, huge admirers of your work.

I hope that at some point we get a chance

to go on one of your voyages so we can witness this ourself.

And when and if, not if,

when you have more progress in this space,

we would hope that you would reach out.

We really, really wanna understand

if they are saying things like,

yeah, do you want krill or shrimp for lunch today?

That's what I wanna hear.

It really comes down to lunch choices.

That's what we wanna know.

How do humpbacks decide what they're eating for lunch?

Oh, the mysteries of the universe.

How do they find it?

That's what we wanna know.

And does it taste good?

Yeah, exactly.

And are the calves complaining?

They're like, oh, krill again?

Mom, give me milk.

Yes.

Yeah, my spell checker keeps trying to change

misdeceit to masticate.

And chewing is the one thing

that these whales definitely do not do.

They eat their victims whole.

Well, Lisa, Fred, Brenda, Josie, Jody,

thank you guys for joining us.

We really, really appreciate it.

Keep up the incredible work

and yeah, keep making the impossible not impossible.

And that wraps up another episode of the podcast

where we talk to some of the most fascinating people

who are transforming the impossible

into the not impossible.

A big thank you to the study team

for sharing how their work with whale communication

could pave the way for interspecies

and even interplanetary dialogue.

It's conversations like these that remind us

that even our most out of the world dreams

are within the limits of possibility.

Don't forget to follow us

on your favorite podcast platforms

and remember, change is hard.

But making the world a better place,

it's not impossible.