Whale said: Inside the quest to eavesdrop on animals

For centuries, human beings believed they were the only species that could “speak”.

- Bhanuj Kappal

The buzzing of bees, calls of birds, lion’s roar and dolphin’s screech were just a background score in this production in which we were the main characters; nobody else got any lines.

Then, in the early 1900s, Karl von Frisch proved that honeybees perform a dance in the hive that conveys to other bees where the nearest food sources are. This kicked off the study of how animals communicate.

By the 1960s, it was clear that certain species call and sing to each other in notes that vary with the message: summons, warning, invitation to mate. One such set of sounds, recorded by Roger Payne, Katy Payne and Scott McVay, became the bestselling 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale.

Now, researchers are finally beginning to decode how some of this communication works.

In February, for instance, an international study published in the journal Science analysed eight years of recordings from humpback whales to find that certain shorter sounds are used far more frequently than other, more complex ones. Essentially, whale songs fall into a pattern called the Zipfian distribution, in which the most common word ina language (eg “the”) shows up twice as often as the second-most-used word, and three times as often as the third-most-common word (and so on).