{"id":89533,"date":"2023-10-25T08:30:26","date_gmt":"2023-10-25T12:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=89533"},"modified":"2025-09-30T09:47:29","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T13:47:29","slug":"whale-communication-gero-ai","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/whale-communication-gero-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Decoding Whale Communication with AI: What Whales are Saying & What They Can Teach Us"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Decoding Whale Communication with AI: What Whales are Saying & What They Can Teach Us\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

Shane Gero<\/a>‘s family is bigger than most. He has his immediate family, made up of his wife and three sons, his extended family, and his whale family \u2013 a group of around 400 sperm whales that reside in the Eastern Caribbean Sea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 8, the whale family welcomed a new calf to their pod, an event that will go down in history as the first ever filmed and recorded sperm whale birth. Gero, a scientist-in-residence in Carleton University’s Department of Biology<\/a>, was leading the crew that witnessed it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“I felt so happy for them (the whales) in that moment,” Gero recalls. “It was so galvanizing to witness, especially alongside all these people from different places and disciplines. We all felt the extreme weight of that day.”<\/p>\n\n\n

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Where it Began<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Gero has been researching this particular family of whales for almost 20 years. His fascination with the mammals was ignited in the 1980s \u2013 like that of many children during that era \u2013 by watching Free Willy<\/em> and CBC’s Danger Bay.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Shane Gero, Carleton University scientist-in-residence, has been researching sperm whales for over two decades (photo by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This interest turned to passion, and eventually a career, when he began working with the legendary scientist, Hal Whitehead, at Dalhousie University during his PhD. Together, Whitehead and Gero journeyed to the Eastern Caribbean where they encountered families of sperm whales thriving off the leeward coast of Dominica. This finding launched Gero’s Dominica Sperm Whale Project<\/a> (DSWP).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, Gero and his team have put in thousands of hours observing the sperm whale population, detailing their behaviors and history. In 2019, Gero was approached with the idea for a large collaborative initiative \u2013 one that would attempt to understand whale communication whilst also focusing on conservation. Project CETI<\/a> was launched a year later, where Gero is now the lead biologist. In 2021, Gero’s work with sperm whales contributed to an Emmy-award winning documentary<\/a>, Secrets of Whales<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Decoding Whale Communication with AI<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Project CETI is a non-profit organization made up of a team of scientists, technologists and conservationists. The group has deployed ‘listening stations’ off the coast of Dominica. Made up of dozens of underwater microphones, the stations record non-stop audio 365 days a year; localize where the whales are; and pinpoint which whales are making sounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Project CETI’s listening stations in Dominica record ocean activity all-year round (photo by Project CETI)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The team has also begun implementing artificial intelligence into their work. To better track the whales, they are developing autonomous drones that can fly over oceans, locate sperm whales, and place a non-invasive wearable device to their backs as they surface.<\/p>\n\n\n

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“These designs are not only advancing to the scope of marine biology, but they are helping us better contribute to conservation efforts,” Gero says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

The small computers, which stick on using suction cup technology, are programmed with sensors that allow the Project CETI team to monitor whale movement, heart rate, light, depth and much more. Given that these devices are non-invasive, they will eventually fall off \u2013 at which time the drones will be programmed to find and retrieve them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Shane Gero placing a non-invasive listening device to capture whale communication (photo courtesy of Jennifer Modigliani)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Prior to this development, these animal-worn computers were larger and could only be deployed manually by researchers using a long pole to carefully place them on whales’ backs as they surfaced.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“We’ve mastered figuring out which whales are saying what, but the when, where and why is what we’re trying to decipher now,” says Gero. “That behavioral and social context is hard to capture on a bigger scale, but Project CETI is building the capacity to do just that.”<\/p>\n\n\n

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What Whales Have to Say<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What Gero and Project CETI have discovered so far about whale communication is quite interesting. Sperm whales communicate through the use of codas, a series of clicks that are comparable to Morse code. Each clan’s codas are distinct, using different rhythms and tempos. This is how Gero is able to tell which whales they are listening to. The families that he’s been following use a specific coda which he calls the one-one-three to signify the pattern of their clicks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n