Whales Were Always Speaking: How We've Finally Cracked The Code

📖 Read the companion essay

We've spent centuries drawing a line between humans and every other creature—a line we've used to justify exploitation and exceptionalism. First, we said animals can't feel pain. Science disproved that. Then we shifted to consciousness, language, and culture as the final barriers. That line is now dissolving faster than ever.

In this episode, we dive deep into Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), one of the most ambitious scientific endeavors of our time. Founded by marine biologist David Gruber, this interdisciplinary team of 50+ experts is using AI, advanced robotics, and underwater acoustics to decode sperm whale communication—and what they've discovered is stunning.

Researchers have identified up to 600 distinct vocalizations with vowel-like elements, regional dialects, and structured syntax. When linguist Gašper Beguš realized whales communicate on a different temporal scale and adjusted the playback speed, familiar speech-like patterns emerged. The complexity was always there. We were just listening wrong.

But this goes far beyond translation. It's about recognizing that human activities—the roar of 100,000 shipping vessels, seismic blasts, military sonar—constitute what legal scholars are framing as torture in the whale's sound-based world. With 300,000 annual bycatch deaths and 20,000 ship strike fatalities, we're not just killing individuals—we're silencing entire libraries of cultural knowledge.

We explore the legal fight for whale personhood, the indigenous wisdom that's underst

This is Heliox: Where Evidence Meets Empathy

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:25

This is Heliox, where evidence meets empathy. Independent, moderated, timely, deep, gentle, clinical, global, and community conversations about things that matter. Breathe easy, we go deep and lightly surface the big ideas. We've spent, well, basically centuries as a species drawing this hard, bright line between ourselves and every other creature on the planet. It's a line we've used to justify our actions, our exploitation, and, you know, our own sense of exceptionalism. For a long time, the defense for that line was really simple.

Speaker 2: 1:10

It was that animals can't feel pain.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Exactly. And when science just comprehensively disproved that, the argument had to shift.

Speaker 2: 1:18

It did. the new and you could say the final line of defense became something else. It became about consciousness, about animals lacking complex language or culture.

Speaker 1: 1:28

Right. These are the qualities, the things we've always told ourselves that make us uniquely human, uniquely worthy of things like rights and stewardship.

Speaker 2: 1:35

And that line, that intellectual firewall that separates us from the rest of the living world.

Speaker 1: 1:39

It's now blurring faster than ever. And what's interesting is it's not blurring because of some new philosophy. It's happening because of radical influences in technology.

Speaker 2: 1:47

Yeah, we are genuinely on the verge of interspecies communication, a reality that was, I mean, until very recently, pure science fiction.

Speaker 1: 1:56

And the stakes for actually achieving this communication are, well, they're almost impossible to overstate.

Speaker 2: 2:02

It challenges the very foundation of human dominance, of how we see our place in the world.

Speaker 1: 2:07

Absolutely. So today we are doing a massive deep dive into one of the most exciting, most ambitious scientific endeavors of our time. the Cetacean Translation Initiative.

Speaker 2: 2:20

Most people know it as Project CET.

Speaker 1: 2:22

Right, Project CET. It was founded by this pioneering marine biologist, David Gruber, a scientist who has dedicated his life to seeing the ocean not just as a resource, but as a place filled with deep, complex, and intelligent life.

Speaker 2: 2:35

So our mission today is to really take you inside the mechanics of this groundbreaking work. We need to understand precisely how things like AI, sophisticated robotics, and cutting-edge underwater acoustics are all coming together.

Speaker 1: 2:47

All to allow this massive team of global experts to begin decoding the communication of really the largest animal minds on the planet, the sperm whale.

Speaker 2: 2:56

But the science, as you said, is only half the story.

Speaker 1: 2:58

It really is. The other, and maybe more profound, half is the so what. We are diving into why leading international lawyers and ethicists believe that if CEI succeeds in translating even a rudimentary dictionary of whale language,

Speaker 2: 3:14

It could fundamentally shatter global human apathy.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Yes, and galvanize the world to recognize, for the first time ever, the legal rights of whales. I mean, it's a seismic shift in how we conceive of and treat the living world around us.

Speaker 2: 3:29

And to really grasp the importance here, we have to acknowledge the subject itself. The sperm whale is, it's truly the animal of superlatives.

Speaker 1: 3:37

Oh, for sure. They are the ultimate depth-diving giants capable of going down over 3,000 feet.

Speaker 2: 3:42

And crucially, they have the largest brain on Earth, significantly larger than ours. Plus, they operate in these incredibly stable, tight-knit, multi-generational, and strictly matrilineal societies.

Speaker 1: 3:53

That social complexity alone suggests a form of intelligence that we're really only just beginning to fathom.

Speaker 2: 3:58

And Gruber's approach to this whole task, it comes from a lifetime of observation. His fascination didn't even start in the ocean. It was on land, watching the collective intelligence of ants, the complexity of biofluorescent sea life.

Speaker 1: 4:10

Which led him to found C.E. Airy in 2020 as a nonprofit, one dedicated purely to listening to and translating these ocean voices, starting with the sperm whale.

Speaker 2: 4:21

The sheer scale of this initiative tells you everything you need to know about how difficult this challenge is. C.E. Airy is a major, highly interdisciplinary effort. Right. And it's deliberately centered on the small eastern Caribbean island of Dominica, right between Guadeloupe and Martinique. Right. Because there's a resident population of sperm whales there. It provides a consistent subject base.

Speaker 1: 4:42

And the team is huge.

Speaker 2: 4:43

It's vast. Over 50 experts from fields that, frankly, rarely interact. You have marine biologists, computational linguists, AI researchers, cryptographers, roboticists, and acoustic engineers all working together.

Speaker 1: 4:55

That mix of expertise is exactly why this effort is so unique. I mean, they're not just doing marine science as usual. They're approaching this problem like cryptographers trying to break an alien code.

Speaker 2: 5:06

A code that's been spoken right beneath the waves for millennia.

Speaker 1: 5:10

And the name itself, Cetacean Translation Initiative, that's an intentional nod, isn't it?

Speaker 2: 5:15

Oh, absolutely. It's a reference to the famous SETI Institute, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. They are, in essence, treating these highly intelligent creatures as an alien species living right here on Earth.

Speaker 1: 5:29

One that's just been waiting for us to finally figure out how to listen.

Speaker 2: 5:32

It perfectly frames the immense challenge. We're trying to breach the interspecies communication barrier, a barrier that, you know, many scientists previously just assumed was unachievable. This is really the first sustained, technologically sophisticated attempt to cross that divide.

Speaker 1: 5:47

OK, so let's unpack this foundational science because it's where Project CET has made its most radical breakthroughs. The first hurdle is just understanding the raw input. When we talk about sperm whale communication, what we're really talking about is CODAs. How are these rhythmic bursts of clicks actually produced, and what makes them the focus here?

Speaker 2: 6:09

So CODAs are the core acoustic unit of their communication. They are, just as you said, rhythmic bursts of clicks, almost like sonic punctuation. And the mechanism for how they're produced is one of the most fascinating parts of their biology. It's a purely bioacoustic process, so it's entirely different from how we speak. The whale generates sound when air is pushed through its really complex nasal passages and over these specialized internal structures in their heads called phonic lips.

Speaker 1: 6:36

Phonic lips. That sounds almost, I don't know, poetic. But what's the functional analogy for a listener? I mean, how do you generate sound without traditional vocal cords?

Speaker 2: 6:44

Well, think of it less like singing and more like a highly controlled internal percussion system. The sperm whale skull has these massive organs above the jaw that are devoted entirely to sound generation, mainly the spermaceti organ. So when air moves over those phonic lips, it creates vibrations. It's like a really sophisticated internal pneumatic sound generation system. And this whole process is optimized for making incredibly powerful, focused acoustic signals in water.

Speaker 1: 7:12

Where sound travels, what, four times faster than in air?

Speaker 2: 7:15

Exactly. So they are, in essence, highly specialized biosonic emitters.

Speaker 1: 7:19

So before C.E.K.I. came along with all this AI and cryptography, what was the established scientific assumption about what these codas actually meant?

Speaker 2: 7:29

The long-held assumption was that these clicks were pretty simple mechanical signals, you know, maybe just announcing their location or their depth or a very rudimentary emotional state.

Speaker 1: 7:39

Like a kind of simple Morse code?

Speaker 2: 7:40

Precisely. That was the common analogy. It suggested the communication system lacked syntax or grammar or any of the complex structure we see in human language. The prevailing thought was that complex language was exclusively an emergent property of the human brain.

Speaker 1: 7:54

And that assumption fundamentally changed when they introduced all this advanced technology. Can you tell us about the key tools they're using for data collection and how that data feeds into these custom AI models?

Speaker 2: 8:07

Yeah, so to gather data in a way that really respects the whale's presence, CETI uses a whole suite of cutting-edge tools. They have hydrophones for passive recording, which means they're just listening. They use drones for overhead observation.

Speaker 1: 8:20

And crucially, those on-whale sensors.

Speaker 2: 8:23

Yes, the non-invasive on-whale sensors. They attach with suction cups, which allows the researchers to record the whale's exact vocalizations, its heart rate, and its dive profile all at the same time. This generates these massive, multifaceted data sets of acoustic and physiological information.

Speaker 1: 8:40

And all of that data gets fed into these custom-built AI models. We've heard the analogy chat GPT for whales, but you mentioned that's actually quite misleading.

Speaker 2: 8:49

It is very misleading because the goal is fundamentally different. Large language models like chat GPT, they're trained on the entire internet, a massive corpus of human language and culture. The C.E.K.I. models are intentionally small, highly constrained, and what the researchers call brain-like. They are fed only sperm whale sounds. The goal isn't translation based on our knowledge. It's to observe how the model, when it's only exposed to the acoustic data, organizes and recognizes patterns within the data itself.

Speaker 1: 9:19

So they are letting the AI tell them where the language structure is rather than trying to impose human linguistic categories onto the whale sounds from the start.

Speaker 2: 9:28

Exactly. It allows the researchers to kind of peer inside the model and see how structure is being identified purely from the acoustic input. And that methodology is what led to these truly stunning discoveries that just shatter the old Morse code assumption.

Speaker 1: 9:42

So what has CETI actually quantified about the complexity of this sperm whale alphabet?

Speaker 2: 9:47

Well, the numbers alone are staggering. The researchers have identified a minimum of 156 and possibly up to 600 distinct types of sperm whale codas. To put that in perspective, that level of complexity suggests a sperm whale phonetic alphabet, very much like human phonemes. You know, the basic distinct components of language that we string together to create words and meaning.

Speaker 1: 10:10

And it's not just the number of distinct sounds, is it? It's how they're used.

Speaker 2: 10:14

Right. The rigorous analysis shows that these click patterns shift based on what the researchers call conversational context. These patterns carry significant social meaning. They're not random mechanical blips. They are structured exchanges.

Speaker 1: 10:28

On top of that, the research shows distinct regional differences.

Speaker 2: 10:32

Mm-hmm. Whales in different areas vocalize with distinct variations, much like a person with a heavy Scottish accent sounds different from a speaker from Southern California.

Speaker 1: 10:40

Which confirms that this is a highly structured communication system that is learned and shared socially, not just some instinctual noise.

Speaker 2: 10:48

Yes. The existence of regional dialects strongly suggests a cultural inherited knowledge system, which is critical when we get to the legal arguments later. But the breakthrough that truly bridges the gap between whale acoustics and human linguistics came in the 2024 and 2025 findings.

Speaker 1: 11:05

The ones involving vowel-like elements.

Speaker 2: 11:07

Exactly. This is the moment their communication system suddenly became much more recognizable to human ears and brains.

Speaker 1: 11:13

Okay, this is where it gets really interesting. They found vowel-like elements and even diphthongs like a connected pair of vowel sounds, like the ow in the word cow.

Speaker 2: 11:23

That's right. Specifically, they identify these discrete COTA-level patterns they named the ACOTA vowel and the ICOTA vowel. These are not just occasional sounds. They are systematically exchanged in structured conversation.

Speaker 1: 11:34

But the immediate question is, how are these massive marine mammals generating something that functions structurally, like a human vowel?

Speaker 2: 11:40

The key finding is the discovery that whales are actively modulating the frequency of these click sequences. They observe rising, falling, and combined frequencies. They're controlling these COTA vowels dynamically.

Speaker 1: 11:51

Can you give us a hypothetical example of how that might encode meaning?

Speaker 2: 11:55

Sure. So if you look at the icoda vowel pattern, researchers observed it can be long or short in duration. This parallels how many human languages use vowel length to differentiate meanings.

Speaker 1: 12:07

Okay.

Speaker 2: 12:07

So for a whale, perhaps a long, drawn-out icoda is a call for attention or danger, while a short, sharp icoda might specify a location or a confirmation. The fact that they can manipulate the duration, pitch, and frequency of these elements suggests they are encoding multiple layers of meaning into a single burst of sound.

Speaker 1: 12:26

But the real linguistic stroke of genius here involved how the researchers adjusted their own perception.

Speaker 2: 12:32

Their perception of time, specifically.

Speaker 1: 12:34

Right.

Speaker 2: 12:34

That's where the linguist Gopra Bigu came in. He realized that the human comparison was flawed because our vowels are produced by vocal folds vibrating incredibly fast. Sperm whales use their massive, slow-moving phonic lips.

Speaker 1: 12:48

So relative to the mechanism, their clicks are just produced much, much slower than our vowels.

Speaker 2: 12:52

Exactly. Pigouche hypothesized that the critical difference was that the whale's internal perception of time must be vastly slower than ours.

Speaker 1: 13:01

So in essence, we were listening to their complex conversations on the wrong speed setting, like we were trying to understand a novel being played at one rotation per minute.

Speaker 2: 13:11

Precisely. Once they removed the absolute timing constraints from the vocalizations and sped them up computationally, They found that, and this is a quote, familiar speech-like patterns emerged. Wow. The structures became so clear that researchers could actually transcribe them using human linguistic notation, like the letters A or I, to describe the rhythmic organization.

Speaker 1: 13:32

That realization is just profound. It suggests that the barrier between their communication and our speech isn't one of fundamental complexity or structure, but one of perceptual scale. The complexity was there all along.

Speaker 2: 13:45

It was. We just couldn't hear it properly because we were operating on a different clock. Bagus noted that what used to be seen as this alien-looking Morse code-like system just became much more human-like.

Speaker 1: 13:55

And that moves the conversation beyond just communication signaling emotion or location and firmly into the realm of language.

Speaker 2: 14:03

It has to. The identified structures, the rhythm, the structured combinations of distinct sounds, the regional dialects, the vowel-like elements. These are the foundational hallmarks of human language. Finding these in a non-human species is a crucial step in deciphering meaning and really in understanding the evolution of intelligence itself.

Speaker 1: 14:24

And that technical, that linguistic breakthrough, it's only possible because of the philosophy that's driving David Gruber's work. It's an approach rooted in respect and what he calls deep listening.

Speaker 2: 14:34

Right. He fundamentally rejects the traditional human above species hierarchy that has characterized so much of Western science for centuries.

Speaker 1: 14:42

His core belief is that scientific research should foster this profound understanding without causing harm or disruption.

Speaker 2: 14:48

And his career has focused on trying to understand the world from the animal's perspective. I mean, he famously built a camera modeled on a shark's eye just to see the world as they preceded.

Speaker 1: 14:58

Which is a world of light, shadow, and movement we are entirely blind to.

Speaker 2: 15:02

Exactly. And this respectful presence, it's not just some intellectual exercise. It yields concrete scientific results.

Speaker 1: 15:09

Like his discovery of a biofluorescent sea turtle.

Speaker 2: 15:13

Yes. He credits that discovery in the South Pacific not to aggressive searching, but to patience and a respectful distance that allowed the animal to approach him and essentially reveal itself under non-stressful conditions.

Speaker 1: 15:26

So CEI is explicitly framed as a deep listening experiment. It's meant to initiate a huge cultural shift in how humans relate to and then subsequently protect the natural world.

Speaker 2: 15:38

Because if you approach the study of an animal as just a resource to be measured or tagged or exploited, you will inevitably introduce bias and miss the complexity of their inner lives. You get the science you deserve, not the science that's possible.

Speaker 1: 15:51

And this philosophy directly dictated the practical methods they used for data collection, which led to the development of this innovative tap-and-go tagging technique.

Speaker 2: 15:59

Which solves a major ethical and practical problem in traditional marine biology research.

Speaker 1: 16:04

A huge one.

Speaker 2: 16:05

It absolutely does. I mean, traditional tagging of large cetaceans, it involved researchers on a noisy boat's prow, often using a 20-foot pole to physically slap a tag on them.

Speaker 1: 16:15

I can't imagine how stressful that is.

Speaker 2: 16:17

Well, that proximity, combined with the noise and the shadow of the vessel, it caused significant stress, a rush of stress hormones, and behavioral changes in the whales. Researchers have been searching for a better way for a long time.

Speaker 1: 16:31

And with sperm whales, they're only at the surface for about 8 minutes of a 45-minute dive. So tagging them at the right moment without causing them to just dive immediately is a massive logistical challenge.

Speaker 2: 16:42

The tap-and-go method completely revolutionizes this. It uses a custom-built drone, one that's engineered to withstand saltwater and rough seas, which has flown remotely and silently near the whale.

Speaker 1: 16:54

And it just gently presses a sensor on its back.

Speaker 2: 16:56

Right. It gently presses this specialized, highly adhesive suction cup sensor onto the whale's back from a distance. The tag adheres. It collects audio, heart rate, movement data for hours or even days. And then it just pops off. And then it automatically detaches and floats to be recovered.

Speaker 1: 17:13

That sounds significantly more efficient and dramatically less invasive. So how successful were the trials?

Speaker 2: 17:19

Daniel Vogt, the research engineer leading the drone effort, reported remarkable success. The entire operation from aligning the drone to deployment takes less than seven minutes.

Speaker 1: 17:29

Wow.

Speaker 2: 17:30

And during their initial trials off Dominica, they found that over half of their 20 attempts were successful, which is a fantastic success rate for remote deployment like this.

Speaker 1: 17:38

And this is where that non-invasive approach really pays off. Because the whale isn't stressed, the data quality just improves dramatically. That heart rate data in particular must be a crucial baseline.

Speaker 2: 17:50

It's vital. The combination of audio, heart rate, and dive depth information, all collected without the disturbance of a loud boat or a physical intrusion, allows them to correlate vocalizations directly with the whale's internal state.

Speaker 1: 18:02

Which is vital for the legal arguments later on. They can look for the acoustic signature of stress or psychological harm caused by human interference.

Speaker 2: 18:10

Exactly. It's a sophisticated, multi-layered toolkit focused on minimizing the human footprint.

Speaker 1: 18:16

And the power of this trust-based approach was so dramatically illustrated by an observation the CEDI team made in July 2023. This anecdote about the sperm whale birth is a low. It's just something you have to pause and appreciate for its intimacy.

Speaker 2: 18:31

It was an incredible, unprecedented moment. In the deep, clear waters off Dominica, 11 adult whales from a close-knit extended family unit, what they call a clan, gathered together.

Speaker 1: 18:44

And there was this distinctive chorus of codas.

Speaker 2: 18:46

A sustained chorus. And amidst that, a newborn calf emerged. As Gruber described the scene, newborns are acutely vulnerable. They have lower oil content, and they're prone to sinking easily, which means they can quickly drown before they learn to coordinate their movements.

Speaker 1: 19:01

So it's a moment of immense peril for the newborn, and what happened next just speaks volumes about their collective intelligence.

Speaker 2: 19:06

The social action was just extraordinary. The adult whales immediately surrounded the fragile calf. They began taking turns in coordinated pairs, lifting the newborn to the surface, supporting it with their bodies, allowing it to take those essential first breaths. Wow. And they continued this deliberate supportive action until the calf stabilized and was able to swim on its own.

Speaker 1: 19:29

That level of communal care, that coordinated effort to protect the most vulnerable member of their society, it's undeniable evidence of complex social intelligence.

Speaker 2: 19:38

And Gruber noted that witnessing this incredibly intimate moment, a vulnerable life or death family event, was a direct result of the trust CEI had so painstakingly built.

Speaker 1: 19:49

Their consisting use of non-invasive methods like the silent drones and passive hydrophones, it proved their intention wasn't to interfere. It was just to listen.

Speaker 2: 19:57

It is a powerful validation of the whole premise that respect fosters scientific access.

Speaker 1: 20:02

Which brings us to the critical discussion of ethical guardrails. Because if we are on the cusp of decoding animal communication, a technology that will inevitably become more powerful, we have to anticipate the risks.

Speaker 2: 20:13

Absolutely. This is why NYU's UM-OFF program, in collaboration with CETAI, proposed these 12 comprehensive ethical principles for AI-assisted animal communication studies.

Speaker 1: 20:25

The scientific community has a responsibility to proactively establish these boundaries.

Speaker 2: 20:29

And the primary concern is the potential for misuse of these communication tools for human exploitation or benefit. For example, the researchers worry about poachers using synthesized vocalizations to attract animals to specific locations for easier capture or killing.

Speaker 1: 20:44

Or even the more common, though less lethal, forms of exploitation, like unscrupulous tourism operations.

Speaker 2: 20:51

Precisely. The concern is that businesses would use whale calls to basically lure the animals and turn them into entertainment for tourists, stripping them of their autonomy and privacy. But the most alarming application is the large-scale military use of this technology.

Speaker 1: 21:05

You mean the potential for sophisticated military sonar or other applications to mimic or aggressively disrupt their communication channels?

Speaker 2: 21:12

That's exactly it. The ability to understand and manipulate their language environment could be devastating if used by military forces for strategic advantage, potentially deafening or driving away entire populations.

Speaker 1: 21:24

Cesar Rodriguez Garavito, the director of Moth, he emphasized that their collaboration isn't about mindlessly chasing the dream of breaking the communication barrier.

Speaker 2: 21:35

It's about developing the necessary legal and ethical standards before that dream is fully realized.

Speaker 1: 21:40

So beyond just avoiding harm, what are some of the proactive, positive duties outlined in those principles?

Speaker 2: 21:46

Well, the principles are designed to create a duty of care toward the species being studied. Key elements include the duty to protect the animal's privacy and autonomy, ensuring that data collected about their location, movement, and social habits are never used to facilitate exploitation.

Speaker 1: 22:01

Okay.

Speaker 2: 22:02

There is also a duty to report any observed exploitation immediately and critically, a mandate to ensure that any benefits derived from the data, whether technical or commercial, must primarily benefit the animals and their ecosystems.

Speaker 1: 22:15

That is a crucial distinction. It shifts the ethical conversation from simply avoiding bad outcomes to actively ensuring good ones. It basically commits the research to advancing

Speaker 2: 22:26

the whale's legal standing. It means that technology has to be weaponized for conservation, not for convenience. It establishes that understanding them comes with an immediate and forcible duty to protect them. And that foundation scientific proof of language, coupled with an ethical mandate to do no harm, is the perfect bridge to the legal fight for

Speaker 1: 22:47

personhood. Okay, so let's pivot now from the technical science and ethical practice to the profound legal and philosophical implications. As we established right at the top, science has spent centuries systematically chipping away at the arguments used to separate humans from the rest

Speaker 2: 23:02

of the animal kingdom. And this challenge to human superiority has played out in two clear historical phases in the West. Phase one was the intellectual claim that animals couldn't feel pain.

Speaker 1: 23:12

Which modern neuroscience has just dismissed. Completely. And phase two shifted the defense

Speaker 2: 23:18

to complexity. The belief that animals lack consciousness, culture, and language. The essential qualities that historically grant rights in human legal systems. And this idea of challenging

Speaker 1: 23:29

human domination is incredibly disruptive going back centuries, long before modern neuroscience. You really can't discuss the threat to human exceptionalism without acknowledging Charles

Speaker 2: 23:39

Darwin. Darwin's insights were politically and economically explosive. A decade before he published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he confided to a friend that sharing his core theory

Speaker 1: 23:51

felt like confessing a murder. And that wasn't hyperbole. He knew exactly what he was challenging. The murder of what, though? The murder of the fundamental moral license that underpin the entire industrial age and the colonial project.

Speaker 2: 24:03

Right. The truth that humans evolved from a common ancestor with all other species, it didn't just upend theology. It directly threatened the entire economic system built on the premise of human dominion and our limitless right to exploit nature as a resource.

Speaker 1: 24:17

Because if we are merely part of the web of life, not inherently superior to it, then our right to fell forests, drain wetlands, and hunt species to extinction just, it falls apart.

Speaker 2: 24:29

Darwin offered the intellectual threat. But for whales specifically, there was an emotional catalyst decades later that really galvanized the anti-whaling movement globally.

Speaker 1: 24:39

You're talking about the recordings made by Roger and Katy Payne in the 1970s.

Speaker 2: 24:42

The humpback whale songs, yes. They released an album of these otherworldly melodic exchanges that sounded undeniably organized and complex. And suddenly, the public heard communication that was just unmistakably filled with meaning.

Speaker 1: 24:56

And it fostered this massive wave of public empathy. It was instrumental in shifting global policy away from commercial whaling.

Speaker 2: 25:03

Right. That recording offered an emotional, almost artistic sense of complexity. But now Project CI is moving beyond empathy and providing the hard scientific, linguistic and statistical proof of structured language.

Speaker 1: 25:15

And to truly understand why human activity causes such deep, verifiable agony for whales, we have to introduce this crucial philosophical concept, the umwelt.

Speaker 2: 25:24

The umwelt. It's a German word. It means environment or surrounding world. But philosophically, it refers to the unique sensory world that every single animal, including us, inhabits.

Speaker 1: 25:36

It's the concept, brilliantly explored by the writer Ed Young, that every creature perceives only a sliver of actual reality. Our sensory equipment filters the universe to prioritize what we need for survival.

Speaker 2: 25:48

And our reality, our sliver, is dominated by sight. We use light to navigate, socialize, and survive. We prioritize structured, articulated language. But the whale's umwelt is profoundly different.

Speaker 1: 26:00

How so?

Speaker 2: 26:01

For them, and for other cetaceans, they live in a world where sound effectively replaces sight as the dominant sense. Light doesn't penetrate the deep ocean, but sound and vibrations can travel for miles. Their entire existence, hunting, navigation, communicating, finding family, it all depends on hearing.

Speaker 1: 26:17

They're essentially living in a three-dimensional soundscape.

Speaker 2: 26:19

That's a perfect way to put it. For them, silence or controlled structured noise is life. Uncontrolled noise is chaos and death.

Speaker 1: 26:26

And the legal sources we looked at note that our refusal as humans to imagine or understand the unwelt of other species leads to them suffering in ways most people barely register.

Speaker 2: 26:38

And that's the crux of the legal argument. Because sound is life, identity, and navigation for them, the constant chronic roar of the global shipping fleet, the deafening seismic blasts from fossil fuel exploration, and the military's high-intensity sonar.

Speaker 1: 26:53

These are just irritants or background noise.

Speaker 2: 26:55

Not at all. In their unwelt, this human noise is categorized as a form of violence.

Speaker 1: 27:00

And this philosophical shift regarding the source of suffering, it really sets the stage for the practical legal movement, the global push for the rights of nature, and specifically, a legal personhood for whales.

Speaker 2: 27:11

Right. And the rights of nature movement has deep roots. It's largely led by indigenous communities globally who have always viewed nature as kin, not property. Now, Western scientists and legal scholars are joining this fight, grounding it in robust ecological principles and hard cognitive data.

Speaker 1: 27:26

Let's define legal personhood clearly, because for a lot of listeners, the idea of giving rights to a whale sounds like granting them the right to vote or own a car.

Speaker 2: 27:35

Which it isn't. Legal personhood is a specific legal category. It allows a non-human entity to hold standing and act in its own capacity under the law, typically represented by a human advocate.

Speaker 1: 27:47

And crucially, we already grant this status to purely fictional entities.

Speaker 2: 27:51

All the time. Corporations, trusts, nonprofits, even ships flying a specific flag, all of which can sue and be sued in court. Granting personhood to a whale doesn't mean the whale goes to court. It means advocates can argue on the whale's behalf for its fundamental rights based on verifiable cognitive science rather than treating it merely as human property or a resource.

Speaker 1: 28:12

And this movement is far from just theoretical. We have concrete examples globally.

Speaker 2: 28:16

We do. Ecuador's 2008 constitution was a landmark, recognizing nature's inherent rights, which legally shifts the burden of proof to corporations and the government to demonstrate that their actions will not irreversibly harm an ecosystem.

Speaker 1: 28:30

And in common law jurisdictions, we've seen specific animal rights cases.

Speaker 2: 28:34

Like Sandra the orangutan in Argentina in 2014 and Happy the elephant in the New York Court of Appeals in 2022. In both cases, the lawyers built arguments not on human sentimentality, but on the verifiable evidence of the animal's complex cognitive and emotional capacities.

Speaker 1: 28:50

So the argument is powerfully simple. If we grant personhood status to fictional economic entities like corporations, why is it so impossible to grant that same status to a demonstrably conscious, cultural, and highly intelligent living being like a sperm whale?

Speaker 2: 29:05

And that recognition, informed and accelerated by the Citi findings, is exactly what the collaboration between Gruber's scientific team and Cesar Rodriguez-Garavido's MOF legal program at NYU aims to achieve. They want to use the scientific evidence of language and culture to enforce existing environmental laws better and ultimately to establish new rights entirely.

Speaker 1: 29:24

So this is where the technical data from Citi becomes a direct tool for legal strategy. This collaboration between Gruber at Sidi and Rodriguez Garavito at Moth is focused on arguing for two core non-negotiable rights for sperm whales.

Speaker 2: 29:37

And they're grounded in the scientific evidence of their complexity in their demonstrated suffering. The first is the right to be free from torture.

Speaker 1: 29:44

And this right is critical because it goes far beyond today's often vague, loophole-ridden anti-cruelty or welfare laws?

Speaker 2: 29:52

It does. It requires the law to draw a clear parallel between specific forms of human and whale suffering. particularly focusing on the legal concept of sensory attack.

Speaker 1: 30:01

So how is whale suffering defined as torture in a human legal context?

Speaker 2: 30:06

Well, human courts have a clear precedent for recognizing torture in cases of sensory overload or deprivation because those acts are designed to break the mind and spirit, not just the body. The legal arguments cite the notorious example of U.S. officials at Guantanamo Bay blasting detainees with deafening music for days on end. For whales, the constant chronic exposure to human noise, That ubiquitous drone of 100,000 global shipping vessels, the intense, low-frequency sound pulses from seismic blasts searching for oil, military-active sonar, that is, sensory overload, experienced across vast oceans.

Speaker 1: 30:40

Rodriguez Garavito's analogy is very potent. He described human noise as the equivalent of shining a blinding light straight into a human's eyes.

Speaker 2: 30:49

In the whale's dark sonic umwelt, that comparison holds devastating weight. Noise is described as a form of violence because chronic exposure disorients the whales. It drives them away from crucial feeding and breeding grounds, and it floods their bodies with stress hormones.

Speaker 1: 31:04

And at higher intensities, these sounds can cause permanent hearing loss, internal bleeding. They can even be fatal.

Speaker 2: 31:11

Which is why the legal argument hinges on that devastating physiological reality. A deaf whale is a dead whale. Their very ability to live, hunt, and socialize is entirely dependent on sound.

Speaker 1: 31:22

And the scientific research is now providing the essential legal evidence for this. Historically, the only concrete way to prove that noise bothered whales was to observe physical harm, like bloodied eardrums after stranding events.

Speaker 2: 31:33

Right. But now, CEDI can look for objective, quantifiable metrics. They can look for signatures in their voices, acoustic evidence of psychological distress, and correlate that with high levels of stress hormones measured from non-invasive samples.

Speaker 1: 31:47

And that shifts the argument from observable physical injury to demonstrable, verifiable psychological trauma, which meets the legal threshold for torture.

Speaker 2: 31:57

Exactly. And the right to be free from torture also encompasses the anguish caused by separation and the loss of loved ones. The lawyers cite the tragic case of Juneau, a North Atlantic right whale.

Speaker 1: 32:08

She was a mother who was forced to watch her calf die slowly and agonizingly after a ship strike.

Speaker 2: 32:14

Separated from her by the vessel traffic and the chaos of the environment, this kind of deep communal suffering and protracted anguish is recognized in human courts as a component of torture.

Speaker 1: 32:25

And the evidence from CET, especially that birth anecdote, it supports the argument that for animals that form such close social units, the anguish of forced separation is equally profound.

Speaker 2: 32:35

And must be legally accounted for.

Speaker 1: 32:37

Okay, so the second right they are pursuing is the right to culture. This requires proving that sperm whale activities aren't just instinctual behaviors, but are learned traditions passed down through generations using their language.

Speaker 2: 32:48

And sperm whale culture is incredibly complex. It's been observed for decades. But CEI's work provides the language foundation for it. Their culture includes specific vibratory routes learned from elders, regional dialects that differentiate clans, sophisticated learned foraging techniques, and specific social rituals.

Speaker 1: 33:08

So the critical legal point is that this is not instinct. This is knowledge wrapped in communication.

Speaker 2: 33:13

And it's systematically transmitted across their 70 to 80 year lifespans. And their social structure, based on these deep family bonds, is the vessel for that culture.

Speaker 1: 33:23

Right.

Speaker 2: 33:24

Sperm whales are entirely dependent on one another for stability and survival. Key males live in these lifelong, incredibly close-knit units where they assist in births, share resources, and even babysit one another's young. It's known as alloparenting.

Speaker 1: 33:36

And the rhythmic patterns of codas exchanged during hunts or social gatherings or times of stress.

Speaker 2: 33:42

Serve as the essential social glue that holds these complex societies together.

Speaker 1: 33:45

And the sources note that their process of learning language actually mirrors human infants very closely.

Speaker 2: 33:51

It does. Cavs are observed to babble acoustic patterns before they master the complex, structured codicols that identify them with their specific clan and dialect. This direct parallel to the stages when human infants learn to speak further supports the argument that language acquisition and social knowledge are learned behaviors inherited from the group, not pre-programmed.

Speaker 1: 34:14

So if that culture is transmitted through language and learned knowledge, then the disruption of that transmission is, well, it's a cultural catastrophe, not just an ecological loss.

Speaker 2: 34:23

And that is the core argument the MOTH team is making. Human activities are massively disrupting this cultural inheritance by silencing the elders and severing the bonds.

Speaker 1: 34:33

Commercial fishing is responsible for at least 300,000 annual whale deaths as bycatch globally.

Speaker 2: 34:39

These are not random fatalities. Every single death of a mature female or an elder bull disrupts the transmission of vital knowledge, language, and cultural survival techniques across generations. The death of one whale is the silencing of an entire library of accumulated knowledge for that clan.

Speaker 1: 34:53

That number 300,000 annual bycatch deaths combined with the direct violence of the global shipping fleet paints a devastating picture of ongoing violence.

Speaker 2: 35:03

It does. We have to account for the over 100,000 large commercial vessels operating globally, causing around 20,000 whale deaths annually from painful ship strikes. These deaths often occur quickly, but they are incredibly violent.

Speaker 1: 35:16

And beneath all of this direct violence is the systemic threat.

Speaker 2: 35:20

Hustle fuel use, driving climate change, which causes ocean acidification, heat absorption, and subsequent ecosystem collapse, pushing species toward extinction.

Speaker 1: 35:29

So the lawyers argue that grasping the nuances of whales' communications will deepen our understanding of their social lives, their pain, their health, and make their profound suffering much harder to deny in the eyes of the law.

Speaker 2: 35:39

Because when you can demonstrate in a court of law that human activities are not just killing random marine mammals, but actively silencing the transmission of cultural knowledge and inflicting verifiable psychological torture on highly social conscious beings, well, the moral and legal status of the whale has to change. The time for human exceptionalism, unsupported by data, is running out.

Speaker 1: 36:02

As we wrap up this deep dive, it's just so critical to remember that while Western science and artificial intelligence are providing the hard data, this concept of non-human legal personhood is not some radical invention of the turning first century.

Speaker 2: 36:17

Not at all. It is central to indigenous knowledge systems globally and has been for millennia.

Speaker 1: 36:22

And this collaboration between CETTETI and the legal scholars is intentionally weaving together that cutting edge science with this ancient wisdom.

Speaker 2: 36:31

For many indigenous peoples, personhood is understood simply as an experience common to all forms of life. It's an inherent quality that must be respected, regardless of human economic priorities.

Speaker 1: 36:41

We heard the powerful perspective of Maori leader, Aparahama Edwards, regarding the whale, or tahora.

Speaker 2: 36:47

Edwards describes the whale not as an object or a resource, but as an ancestor, as an older sibling carrying the heartbeat of the ocean. And that perspective dictates a relationship of profound responsibility, stewardship, and equality. It's a definition of kinship, not just conservation.

Speaker 1: 37:05

And this indigenous knowledge was vital in connecting tradition, science, and law decades ago, establishing successful protections.

Speaker 2: 37:13

It really was. In the early 1980s, Maori elders, observing their customary rituals for whales that died or stranded, began noticing these specific distinctive wounds and markings that they recognized as signs of trauma linked to ship activity.

Speaker 1: 37:27

So their cultural observations were instrumental.

Speaker 2: 37:30

Yes, in linking Western veterinary science and law, which led to an enduring response to protect the whales in the region. It demonstrated the power of listening to multiple forms of knowledge.

Speaker 1: 37:39

And this collaboration continues right into the present day. In 2024, indigenous peoples from New Zealand and the Cook Islands signed the Hiwakuputanga Mana Declaration.

Speaker 2: 37:47

Which officially recognizes Wales as legal persons with inherent rights.

Speaker 1: 37:51

For them, this isn't some radical new legal concept. It's simply a continuation of ancestral responsibility.

Speaker 2: 37:59

And a powerful reaffirmation that Wales have always possessed autonomy and agency. As Edwards noted, the Western world has a significant amount to relearn and unlearn about its place in the living world.

Speaker 1: 38:11

This entire effort ultimately circles back to human self-preservation. It's a powerful closing argument made by Cesar Rodriguez Garavito.

Speaker 2: 38:20

He describes our biosphere using the famous house of cards analogy. Humans are not outside observers. We are embedded in the biosphere, entangled in the web of life that whales are also embedded in.

Speaker 1: 38:32

The entire living world depends on each piece playing its role.

Speaker 2: 38:36

And if we remove too many foundational key structural cards, like the highly intelligent, ecologically critical sperm whale, the entire structure inevitably collapses. Our fate is tied to theirs.

Speaker 1: 38:46

So this deep dive began with the question of consciousness, and it seems Project CET is on the brink of answering it definitively.

Speaker 2: 38:53

I think so. If, after years of C.D.'s deep listening and the eventual inevitable translation of larger parts of their language, if we can definitively prove to a court of law and to the world that whales have grandmothers, family bonds, learned dialects, cultural rituals and conversations.

Speaker 1: 39:10

And that their inner worlds are as complex as ours.

Speaker 2: 39:13

Then the ethical responsibility becomes immediate and undeniable.

Speaker 1: 39:17

What is that immediate ethical responsibility we owe to beings we can now definitively prove are conscious, cultural, and capable of profound psychological suffering?

Speaker 2: 39:27

And maybe more philosophically, if we are now finally starting to understand the language of these ancient, massive brain beings who live in a world defined by sound and time scales so vastly different from ours, what essential knowledge, what perspective on life, time, and existence itself are we still forfeiting by only listening to human voices? It's a question of self-correction as much as it is a question of stewardship. Thanks for listening today. Four recurring narratives underlie every episode. Boundary dissolution, adaptive complexity, embodied knowledge, and quantum-like uncertainty. These aren't just philosophical musings, but frameworks for understanding our modern world. We hope you continue exploring our other podcasts, responding to the content, and checking out our related articles at helioxpodcast.substack.com.