A dog with his barking and a cat with his meows try to tell us something. They also do it with the gaze, with the body and with their gestures. Communication between species has been essential for the development of both, allowing link and survival. And there are those who think that whales also want to communicate with us. As? Drawing huge circles in the water to see what we do.
And we are using that communication with whales to establish a relationship with … aliens.
Extraterrestrial communication. We have been trying to establish extraterrestrial communication decades. The contact possibilities are there, but those of communication are already more complex. However, hope is the last thing that is lost. In 2021, researchers from the SETI Institute, the University of California Davis and Alaska Whale Foundation created the Whale-Seti project. The objective was to unravel the complexity of the vocalizations of humpback whales to discern patterns and develop potential forms of interspecies communication.
Talking with whales. Breenda McCowan is one of the main researchers of the project and, in 2023, published an article in which he detailed one of the tests to contact. McCowan recorded 20 minutes of underwater sounds and prosecuted them to try to find a pattern that could attract whales. This is how a 38 -year -old female named Twain approached a hundred meters from the ship … and responded with her own “line” of voice.
For 20 minutes, Twain maintained a vocal exchange with the recordings, adjusting their answers in synchrony with the reproduction intervals. This allowed the researchers to adjust the fragments of the recording to which Twain responded best, but also demonstrated something important: a conversational behavior between humans and a whale.
Rings. The team has continued ‘speaking’ with whales in recent years, getting much more than noise in its ‘tongue’. Fred Sharpe is co -author of that first article and commented that these whales are “extremely intelligent, with complex social systems, songs and social calls”, but in addition to vocalization, Sharpe explained that “manufacture tools.” Not in the form of objects, but as huge rings that are bubble networks.
These rings are, in fact, a sophisticated hunting strategy that implies the creation of bubble rings to corner and capture both fish and krill. The hunchbacks swim in ascending spirals while they release air by their respiratory holes to create vortices that, on the surface, we see as if they were rings.
Thus, instead of spending energy swimming behind the dams, they “catch” a large number of them in those vortices, throwing themselves with their mouths open and swallowing large amounts of dams of a single bite without spending as much energy as in a hunt “to the race.”
Anillos de los 12 episodesos. Imágenes | (a) D. Knaub, (b) F. Nicklen, (c) D. Perrine, (D) W. Davis, (e) G. Flipse, (F) A. Henry, (G) M. Gaughan, (h) H. Romanchik, (I) D. Patton, (J) D. Perrine, (K) S. Instrup, (L) S. Hilbourne
Contact. We could assume that this hunting technique is carried out when they are in an aggressive way, but the interesting thing is the new finding of the McCowan team. In a recent study, researchers exhibit and analyze 12 different episodes in which 11 individual whales created a total of 39 rings with a different objective than hunting: draw our attention.
Friendly whales. Sharpe is clear that whales are creating rings in an apparent attempt to interact curiously, playful or simply to observe our response. Jodi Frediani, participant in the study, comments that “most have voluntarily approach ships and swimmers, producing bubble rings during these episodes.”
We might think that perhaps they wanted to eat that body, but the whale behavior did not indicate that: in these cases, during the release of the ring, the whales were motionless, as waiting, with the body in a horizontal position and without signs of food behavior. Nor were dams within the rings or aggressive behavior, so if they did not want to eat, there were no other whales nearby and there was only one individual specimen and the humans, the conclusion of the researchers is that they were waiting for our response.
Back to the aliens. “We believe that this is the first communicative exchange of this type between humans and humpback whales in the ‘language’ of the humps,” said Sharpe. And although this behavior of the whales and their communication with rings, another of McCowan’s researchers and partner, Dr. Laurence Doyle, recalled the objective of the mission: contact the aliens.
“Due to current technological limitations, a key assumption in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that they would be interested in establishing contact. Therefore, they would direct their signs towards human receptors,” he said. That is, we would be the whales in the eyes of the aliens they are trying to contact. “This important assumption is clearly supported by the behavior of humpback whales,” Doyle said.
It may be that contact with aliens arrives sooner or later, something complex due to the size of the universe, but it is evident that, in that search for contact, we have managed to communicate with much closer neighbors.
Images | OnlineLibray, University of Hawaii’i
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