Whales Are Talking. We Just Don't Know What They're Saying. Yet.
- Dave Daniels
- 5 days ago
- 5 min read
There is a moment inside Clara that happens almost every time.
I'm talking about whales. Specifically, about what we are beginning to understand about how they think, how they communicate, and how they relate to one another. And at some point, I say something that makes the room go very quiet.
Sometimes it's the bowhead whale that does it. Sometimes it's the sperm whale. But it always happens. And when it does, I can see it on people's faces: the quiet realization that the world is much stranger and more wonderful than they thought when they walked in. The fact is that whales have an intelligence that blows most people's minds once they learn it.
I want to share some of that with you here.
The Animal That Was Alive Before the Civil War
In 2007, Alaskan hunters harvested a bowhead whale and found something lodged in its neck: a harpoon tip, the kind that stopped being manufactured in the late 1800s. The animal had been swimming with that fragment in its body for well over a century. Best estimates put the whale's age at around 200 years old when it died.
Two hundred years.
That whale was alive when Abraham Lincoln was born. It watched the entire Industrial Revolution from underneath the Bering Sea. It outlived every person who ever tried to hunt it, often by decades.
Bowhead whales are now believed to be among the longest-lived animals on Earth. And while we're still working out exactly why, they appear to age remarkably slowly, with almost no signs of the cellular deterioration that limits most mammals. Scientists are actively studying their genetics in hopes of understanding what that means for human longevity research.
But I don't lead with the science when I'm standing inside Clara. I lead with the image: a whale that was alive before the Civil War, carrying a 19th-century harpoon in its neck, still swimming. That's the one that makes people go quiet.
Sperm Whales Might Have Names
Here's where things get strange in the best possible way.
Sperm whales communicate using rapid patterns of clicks called codas. For years, researchers assumed codas were simply a form of group identification, a way for whales to signal which clan they belonged to. But recent research, including work coming out of a large collaborative project called Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), is suggesting something much more interesting.
Researchers used artificial intelligence to analyze recordings of sperm whale vocalizations, and found what they're calling a "sperm whale phonetic alphabet," a set of building blocks that function similarly to the sounds that make up human speech. Different whales combine these building blocks in different ways. And some of those combinations appear to be unique to individual animals.
In other words: sperm whales may have names. Not names the way you and I have names, but individual acoustic signatures that they use to identify themselves within their pods. Researchers have found that a sperm whale's acoustic signature, its coda, is more stable over time than its physical appearance. It's their most consistent identifier.
Think about what that means. In the pitch dark of the deep ocean, miles below the surface, these animals know who they're talking to.
A UC Berkeley linguist who studies whale communication describes sperm whales as an alien intelligence living in the ocean next door, and argues that decoding their communication could shift how humans think about other minds entirely.
I find that sentence almost impossible to sit with. An alien intelligence. Living on the same planet. In the same ocean. Right now.
Humpback Whales Have Culture
If sperm whale codas are the ocean's version of language, humpback whale song might be its version of music. And like music, it evolves.
Male humpback whales perform complex, culturally transmitted songs that can change both slowly over time and, occasionally, through rapid revolution, where an entire population suddenly adopts a completely new song.
Here's the remarkable part: these song revolutions spread. A new song emerges in one population, and within a few years, populations thousands of miles away are singing it. Not because they heard it on the radio. Because individual whales traveled, made contact, and learned. Research has shown that whales can learn new song types with high accuracy regardless of how complex the pattern is.
This is cultural transmission. The same process by which humans pass down language, music, and tradition across generations. Humpback whales are doing it in the open ocean, without hands, without written records, without schools.
They're just listening. And remembering. And passing it on.
Orcas Carry Their Dead
In 2018, an orca named Tahlequah, also known as J35, gave birth to a calf that lived for only a few hours. She then carried her dead calf for 17 days over approximately 1,000 miles. Pod members took turns supporting the deceased calf when the mother needed to hunt.
Scientists who study animal emotion were careful with their language, as scientists tend to be. But the behavior was unprecedented in its duration and its coordination. The pod helped. They shared the weight of it, literally.
One expert in animal emotion said it wouldn't be going too far to call what Tahlequah was experiencing grief, noting that grief and love are not uniquely human qualities but things we share with some other animals.
I think about Tahlequah sometimes when I'm talking to kids inside Clara. I don't always bring her up. It depends on the age of the group. But when I do, the room gets very, very quiet.
It's Not Just Whales
This is the part that keeps me up at night, in the best possible way.
Elephants have been documented returning to the bones of deceased herd members, touching them gently with their trunks, sometimes years after the death. Researchers studying elephant communication have found evidence of individual acoustic signatures, the elephant version of what sperm whales appear to do with their codas. Elephants may have names for each other too.
Dolphins have been observed supporting dying pod members at the surface, sometimes at risk to themselves. Crows remember the faces of humans who have wronged them, and will warn their flock about those individuals for years.
The more we look, the more we find. And the more we find, the harder it becomes to argue that complex inner lives, communication, culture, and grief are uniquely human.
What we are really discovering is that we were never the only ones having these experiences. We were just the only ones writing them down.
What This Means for a Gym Full of Kids in Wisconsin
I am not a research scientist. I'm a science educator from Wausau who drives a 56-foot inflatable whale to schools and libraries across the Midwest and tells people what we know about the largest animals on Earth.
But I've watched what happens when a kid hears that a sperm whale might have a name. Or that a bowhead whale was alive before their great-great-great-great-grandparents were born. Or that an orca mother carried her calf for 17 days across 1,000 miles of ocean because she wasn't ready to let go.
Something changes in them. Something opens up.
That's what science education is supposed to do. Not just fill heads with facts, but crack open a door to a universe that is so much larger, stranger, and more alive than anyone told them.
The whales are out there right now. Talking to each other in the dark. Singing songs that travel across entire ocean basins. Mourning their dead.
We're just starting to listen.
Forest Whales brings hands-on marine science and paleontology programming to K-8 schools, libraries, and community events across Wisconsin and the Midwest. To bring Clara to your school or community, visit
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