00:00This robot follows sperm whales across the ocean to decode their language.
00:04It's an autonomous underwater glider that tracks them by listening to their voices.
00:09Sperm whales communicate using patterns of click sounds called codas.
00:14Scientists think they can carry meaning, but decoding them has been a huge challenge
00:18because these animals travel for long periods of time deep underwater.
00:23Tags fall off after a few days.
00:25Stationary sensors lose them as soon as they leave.
00:28Even boat-toed microphones struggle to keep up.
00:31Now this robot, developed by the research initiative Project SETI, changes that.
00:36They're underwater vehicles that just work on buoyancy.
00:40So they go up and down by kind of moving this little bladder back and forth.
00:44So they're very slow and they're very efficient,
00:47but they can travel for months and almost, I believe, years at a time.
00:52Some of them have actually crossed entire oceans in one mission.
00:56It listens in real time and adjusts its path accordingly to stay with the whales,
01:00to collect long-term data while keeping enough distance not to disturb their natural behavior.
01:06Imagine how valuable it would be if we could have the first year of life of every vocalization coming out
01:13of a baby whale.
01:14That would be very helpful for our linguistics and artificial intelligence and marine biologists
01:20to kind of look at the language of sperm whales.
01:23The system could also reveal how whale communication changes in response to human activity,
01:29like shipping, construction, or fishing.
01:31The idea would be that once we could kind of really understand the fundamentals
01:35of a non-human communication system,
01:39this could then expand into elephants and plants.
01:43The system has already been tested at sea
01:45and could eventually be deployed to decode whale communication.
Comments