Before Michelle Fournet moved to Alaska on a whim in her early twenties, she’d never seen a whale. She took a job on a whale watching boat and, each day she was out on the water, gazed at the grand shapes moving under the surface. For her entire life, she realized, the natural world had been out there, and she’d been missing it. “I didn’t even know I was bereft,” she recalls. Later, as a graduate student in marine biology, Fournet wondered what else she was missing. The humpbacks she was getting to know revealed themselves in partial glimpses. What if she could hear what they were saying? She dropped a hydrophone in the water—but the only sound that came through was the mechanical churn of boats. The whales had fallen silent amid the racket. Just as Fournet had discovered nature, then, she was witnessing it recede. She resolved to help the whales. To do that, she needed to learn how to listen to them.
Fournet, now a professor at the University of New Hampshire and the director of a collective of conservation scientists, has spent the past decade building a catalog of the various chirps, shrieks, and groans that humpbacks make in daily life. The whales have huge and diverse vocabularies, but there is one thing they all say, whether male or female, young or old. To our meager human ears, it sounds something like a belly rumble punctuated by a water droplet: whup.
Fournet thinks the whup call is how the whales announce their presence to one another. A way of saying, “I’m here.” Last year, as part of a series of experiments to test her theory, Fournet piloted a skiff out into Alaska’s Frederick Sound, where humpbacks gather to feed on clouds of krill. She broadcast a sequence of whup calls and recorded what the whales did in response. Then, back on the beach, she put on headphones and listened to the audio. Her calls went out. The whales’ voices returned through the water: whup, whup, whup. Fournet describes it like this: The whales heard a voice say, “I am, I am here, I am me.” And they replied, “I also am, I am here, I am me.”
Biologists use this type of experiment, called a playback, to study what prompts an animal to speak. Fournet’s playbacks have so far used recordings of real whups. The method is imperfect, though, because humpbacks are highly attentive to who they’re talking to. If a whale recognizes the voice of the whale in the recording, how does that affect its response? Does it talk to a buddy differently than it would to a stranger? As a biologist, how do you ensure you’re sending out a neutral whup?
One answer is to create your own. Fournet has shared her catalog of humpback calls with the Earth Species Project, a group of technologists and engineers who, with the help of AI, are aiming to develop a synthetic whup. And they’re not just planning to emulate a humpback’s voice. The nonprofit’s mission is to open human ears to the chatter of the entire animal kingdom. In 30 years, they say, nature documentaries won’t need soothing Attenborough-style narration, because the dialog of the animals onscreen will be subtitled. And just as engineers today don’t need to know Mandarin or Turkish to build a chatbot in those languages, it will soon be possible to build one that speaks Humpback—or Hummingbird, or Bat, or Bee.
The idea of “decoding” animal communication is bold, maybe unbelievable, but a time of crisis calls for bold and unbelievable measures. Everywhere that humans are, which is everywhere, animals are vanishing. Wildlife populations across the planet have dropped an average of nearly 70 percent in the past 50 years, according to one estimate—and that’s just the portion of the crisis that scientists have measured. Thousands of species could disappear without humans knowing anything about them at all.
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