Well, now we're going to talk about how whales talk, specifically sperm whales, in fact, which spend quite a lot of their lives in darkness, which means that sound is especially important for them. Well, we know that whales use a variety of noises to communicate and to socialize with each other. Let's have a listen and see what we can hear. A lot of clicking. So using machine learning, scientists are piecing together a sperm whales' alphabet. A new study has found that the species have a far more nuanced communication system than previously thought, combining different sound patterns to create meaning, pretty much the same way that human beings do, actually. Well, let's speak to Taylor Hirsch, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University, specializing in spermwhale sounds. Thanks so much for being with us. Well, just give us a layman's view then of really how spermwhales do communicate, how they talk to each other, and how sophisticated is that language.

Spermwhales communicate using patterned series of clicks. You can think of it as something akin to Morse code, and we call those patterned clicks codas. Whenever we where in the field with sperm whales, we hear them making these codas when they are in social situations, so when they're interacting with each other. And the new paper that came out was characterizing these codas and showing that while in the past, we knew they had different rhythms and tempos. Now it seems like they also almost have inflections, and two whales that are producing codas at the same time can mirror what each other are doing.

And how close... So we know the sounds they make and what they're trying do, but can we actually understand in any way what they are saying?

I think that's always going to be a really exciting challenge with any species that isn't a human, but we are able to get closer. By analyzing the conversations that whales are having in the context in which they produce these different social calls, we can start to understand maybe things like levels of excitement or something like that.

Tell us a bit about how they organize themselves, because I was reading that they're in groups, they're in family groups, and they can even organize babysitting for each other.

Yeah. The most important level of spermwhale life is what we call their social unit. That's anywhere from 3 to 15 whales that they spend a ton of time with. You can think of it like a human family group. These whales will help each other, especially when it comes to raising young whales. If the mother needs to dive very, very deep, over a thousand kilometers into the ocean to forage or to feed, other whales will babysit her calf closer to the surface because the young whales can't dive quite as deep as the adult whales.

As I mentioned, there's this new study. What really do you think this new study has contributed? Because you've been working in this field for a long time. What have we learned now?

I think the new thing we've learned is that there these codas, these click patterns, have more dimensions. There's more to them than you might hear just upon first listen. What the team behind the paper did is they took a really close look at the codas and used machine learning techniques to look at the structure of codas produced in conversations with whales. And it just seems like there is potentially more information being communicated by one coda than we had previously appreciated.

It's a fascinating field. Thank you so much, Taylor Hirsch. I think technically you're a bioacoustician, is that right?

Yes, I am.

The acoustics of biology, if you like. All right. Well, thank you so much for being with us. It's really interesting to talk to you. Taylor Hirsch there, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. Thank you.