Sperm Whales have a language with vowels and diphthongs, and AI tools may help us to understand them!

 This was a most interesting NYT opinion piece dated Non 23, 2025, by David Gruber, a marine biologist.  

Here is a gift link to the article:  https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/23/opinion/whale-language-ai.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5k8.CIB8.4orrrrq5D8xU&smid=url-share

This interested me partly because my daughter and son in law may be starting a family soon and during their Thanksgiving visit, I joked that in their child's life, we'd be able to understand and converse with whales and crows!  When soon after their departure, I read this opinion piece, it took on greater significance to me.  Because of the great work by scientists like Dr. Gruber, and their use of new AI tools, the time to understand whales might be much sooner than I'd thought!  

As a tease, here's a paste from Dr. Gruber's article that got my attention:  

Altogether, these findings are leading us to an extraordinary conclusion: Whales may possess a communication system more intricate than our own, one that possibly predates human language by tens of millions of years.

  • This point, that should give us much humility, strongly suggests that we may more to learn from them than they might learn from us!

A recent 2026 update reports that a whale responded to a human greeting.  This headline overstates just a bit:  
"AI helps humans have a 20-minute 'conversation' with a humpback whale named Twain"  What actually happened is that a UC Davis team played a recorded humpback “contact” call into the ocean, and a humpback whale responded:  "For about 20 minutes, the whale circled them, matching the intervals between each call they played."  https://www.earth.com/news/whale-seti-ai-helps-humans-have-20-minute-conversation-with-humpback-whale-twain/  But the scientist certainly has a point:  “We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language,'” said Dr. McCowan."  

So enjoy the read, and comments, please.  



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