Eavesdropping on whales: Cultured sea creatures need to be heard

April 2021: Patrick Lyne sets out in a small boat to the Beara peninsula between Kerry and Cork. A marine scientist working with the Irish Whale and Dolphin Group, Lyne is an acoustic specialist. Reaching a pod of minke whales, he drops a hydrophone over the side of the boat. The device begins recording the underwater soundscape and by the time he has donned a set of headphones there is a distinct thumping tone. Lyne describes the sounds, which appear on a screen as a series of red spikes, as up-sweeps, down-sweeps, whistles, thump trains and clicks. Beyond that, there is little more that can be said. The language of whales reflects a world and an experience outside of human perception.

Human knowledge of the sea reflects millenniums of voyaging, life-making and studying. But no matter how close any of us might be to the sea, the understandings we hold are incomparable with those of the creatures who have evolved not only biologically, but culturally, within its depths. Whales exist in cultural spaces that span oceans and generations. Their languages carry forms of knowledge that scientists in Ireland are tuning in to. For now, despite the skilled listening of researchers like Lyne, they can only be understood in very technical terms.

The calls of minke whales occur within a frequency range of 150 to 350 Hertz. This is a low-pitched tone similar in range to the human sounds of ships and maritime construction. If Lyne cannot interpret the intrinsic meaning of the calls, he can at least determine what sorts of noise might muddle communications and cause harm to the whales. Underwater sounds are so pervasive that disruptions can be far greater than what we might experience on land. Lyne has to turn down the volume at times for his own sake and on another outing he describes how the engine of a fishing vessel obliterates the call of a whale.

The ease with which Lyne is able to record minkes indicates their prevalence off the southwest coast. He is keen to extend recordings around the island to learn more about the importance of our waters for the species. By associating the sounds he records with observations from the surface – such as mating, greeting, or calling a family member – it might even be possible to determine what some of the calls mean. Translating the language of whales, albeit in a very basic sense, could allow researchers to determine why certain areas are important, allowing humans to respond to the needs of the animals – giving them more space where they need it most.

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Lyne is involved in discussions to designate portions of Ireland’s seas as Important Marine Mammal Areas, protecting spaces that are crucial for feeding and breeding. These behaviours are typically regarded in terms of animals’ survival in the wildness of the seas. But if they can be extended in our thinking as elements of cultures that have endured for centuries through language, then perhaps we should be creating space for them to do more than survive. Perhaps whales should be allowed to thrive and grow in the ways that we expect for our own societies – socially, culturally, linguistically.

[ ‘Exceptional’ numbers of whales feeding off Cork coast ]

Language plays an important role in human understanding of the seas, and it appears the same can be said for whales. In recent years, scholars have been encouraging the growth of ocean literacy: words that provide a shared understanding of human impacts on the seas, the creatures within it and their influence on us. How can we protect what we do not know, they say, and how do we share what we know of the world if not through language?

Considering that forms of knowledge exist outside the human species creates entire worlds of possibilities. There is still much to be learned about the languages and cultures of other creatures, but this will never be achieved if they are lost to extinction. Minke whales are relatively common but they have been heavily targeted by industrial whaling.

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Beyond the clicks and thumps of recordings like Lyne’s, there is no archive of the language of whales. We might think on the human cultures that have been lost, preserved in museums or painstakingly studied by historians in retrospect. Those maritime journeys, livelihoods and tragedies that are remembered in human song, story and verse. There may be an entire historical legacy in the language of whales that we do not comprehend.

Alexander McMaster is a writer, ecologist and diver working between Ireland and the Mediterranean. He is studying a masters in ecology, culture and society in London.