According to a study published in the well-known scientific journal Nature-Communication, exchanges of varnish whales living in the deep sea are not simple and random, but are structured in complex combinations. According to Pratyusha Sharma, the lead author of the study, studies show that the “expressive power” of the mosaic whale is greater than previously anticipated.
Between 2005 and 2018, the team of researchers of the Dominique Spectacular Whale Project, which focuses on the activities of the mosaic whale, collected the voices of some 60 mosaic whales from the Eastern Caribbean mosaic whale community and collected a total of some 8719 tails. The tailings are considered to be the basic unit for the exchange of plaster whales and consist of “singles” that normally last no more than two seconds.
It is noteworthy that tails are usually produced when whales with two or more heads are exchanged. It was described that the research members of the Cetaceans Translation Initiative, a partner of the Dominica Spectrum Whale Project, had also created a huge underwater recording studio, with microphones at different depths of the sea floor to monitor the voices of the moist whales.
Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Cetaceans Language Translation Initiative (CLI) project collated and analysed the 8719 tails through artificial intelligence tools. Researchers group and group these voices on the basis of the rhythm (“the duration of the sound”) and the rhythm (“the interval between the sound”) and find that the “the sound” of these different characteristics can be matched and mixed, creating a large number of distinct tails. These tails form a combination coding system, similar to the “speech system” in the human language system, which researchers refer to as the “smelling whale speech alphabet”. "This is the equivalent of a word created by humans, followed by a sentence by words."
In addition, researchers have found that plaster whales may have an additional decorative “single” in their communication. “These decorative sounds are more present at the beginning or end of a voice change, similar to a label.” Another author of the study explained that.
Dr. Luke Lundell, of St. Andrews University, United Kingdom, devoted to marine mammals, did not participate in the study, which he found interesting. “But the term `smelling whale' is misleading.” According to Rendel, some of this statement places too much emphasis on the “similar relationship between the varnish whale and human beings”. It was reported that many linguists had previously considered complex communication unique to human beings. According to David Gruber, founder and Managing Director of the Cetaceans Language Translation Initiative, it now appears that the scavenger whale also has complex social relationships. “The interpretation of their language systems reveals their similarities with the human language and human society.”
However, one of the authors of the study, Jacob Andreas, said that there was still a long way to go between humans and varnish whales. “We do not yet know what they are specifically expressing. Then we're going to study the voices of the balm whales in different behavioral contexts to understand their communication.