A humpback whale in a typical singing position. Researchers had a chat with one named Twain. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Researchers from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) are generally concerned with things that are out of this world. But recently, they set their sights on something a little closer to home. And on December 12, with the help of a group of whale researchers, they had (and this is true) a 20-minute conversation with a whale.
Our search for E.T. is often met with some skepticism. We pour quite a bit of money into trying to make contact with alien life, and so far, we’ve got nothing to show for it. Meanwhile, there are plenty of creatures here on Earth that we don’t know a whole lot about, so SETI scientists figured they’d try their hand at learning more about some of them, and at the same time, perhaps, more about how they could potentially contact alien life. So they hopped aboard a boat and headed out to a humpback feeding ground off the coast of Alaska to have a little chat with any whales interested in communicating with us. As it turned out, a humpback named Twain was feeling chatty.
The researchers played something called a “contact call” from an underwater speaker to see if any of the whales would respond, and Twain, a female who is pretty well-known to researchers, answered the phone. She approached the vessel and circled it, likely curious about what this strange thing speaking whale was. For 20 minutes, she responded to each call, and even matched the interval variations between each signal.
Dr. Brenda McCowan and Dr. Fred Sharpe at work onboard the Blue Pearl. Photo: Jodi Frediani/SETI
“We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language,’” Dr Brenda McCowan of the University of California, Davis said in a statement.
Of course, we haven’t quite cracked the language barrier yet, so exactly what Twain was telling us can’t be known, but the fact that we were able to illicit a response is pretty amazing on its own. But we also don’t know exactly what we were saying to Twain, either. Still, though, the research team was exited by the results of its experiment.
“Our results show that Twain participated both physically and acoustically in three phases of interaction (Phase 1: Engagement, Phase 2: Agitation, Phase 3: Disengagement),” the team writes in the paper.
Humpback whales are highly intelligent. They have complex social systems and have developed hunting methods that require teamwork and communication, so the SETI team believes that they’re a good test case for future attempts at communicating with aliens.
“Because of current limitations on technology, an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers,” said Dr. Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute, a coauthor on the paper. “This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales.”
