Sperm whales have been sperm whales for longer than humans have walked upright. The cetaceans as a whole arose from artiodactyls (even-toed ungulates like deer, pigs, giraffes, camels, and hippopotamuses) early in the Eocene approximately 55 million years ago. In fact, hippos are the whales’ closest living “land” relative. Whales are first found in the fossil record approximately 52.5 million years ago. There is ongoing debate about the earliest “whale” as various lineages of mammals started spending more and more time in the water again. Read more here about the ongoing science of whale evolution.

The living whales are really animals of extremes. The lifespan of some whale species is more than double that of humans, with the oldest bowhead whales estimated to live for 211 years. The longest-diving beaked whales can also be submerged for over 3 hours, and amazingly, the mature male sperm whales can reach over 18 meters, one of the largest macropredators ever found!

Sperm whales live rich and diverse lives in part of the oceans we humans find difficult to even explore. Sperm whale families are matrilineal, meaning that its grandmothers, mothers, and daughters will live together for life and communally raise and defend each other’s calves. Some families will even share the responsibility of providing milk to the babies! Sperm whale families do not migrate like other big whales, and live in home ranges which can span 100s to 1000s of kilometers. Males will leave their natal families in their teens years and roam across 1000s of kilometers and are known to even swim between oceans.To meet some of the most well-known sperm whale families living in the Eastern Caribbean visit the The Dominica Sperm Whale Project.

Families which share the same coda dialect are members of the same clan. Clans also differ in their diet, their habitat use, movement patterns, and social behavior; and likely a number of ways we don't yet understand. When two whale families meet at sea, they appear to use codas to recognize one another, because families from the same clan will spend time together but families from different clans will not. Behavior is what you do, but culture is how you have learned to do it. These whale clans are different cultures each with their own way of life.  If you want to dive deeper into the culture of whales, consider reading “The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins” by Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, which is an illuminating look into how many kinds of cetaceans learn from each other, communicate in complex languages, and create bonds across decades.

Many whales roam such great distances that no one research group can study them across their entire range. Photo-identification is used to match whales from one place to another when photographed by different people. You can take part in research on whale movement and social relationships by contributing pictures to Flukebook.org.

What would it mean to understand what whales are saying? CETI is a “listening project” that uses advanced machine Learning and robotics to understand what sperm whales are saying. The first phase is to construct a one-of-a-kind large-scale acoustic and behavioral data set to train CETI’s technology to observe whale communication in context and to translate whale-speak. Hear more about how researchers are using AI to decode sperm whale communication in “Could Chat GPT Talk to Whales?” —  a 21 minute video specifically on Project CETI. You can also read the article “Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language”  in National Geographic, listen to Dr. David Gruber’s TED talk, or follow the Project CETI website and social media channels (@projectCETI) as researchers decode sperm whale communication. Lastly, for a broader discussion about how scientists are using AI to talk to animals, read this short article in Scientific American.

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