Eleven female sperm whales, each larger than a school bus, crowd around in the temperate waters of the Caribbean, engaged in a birthing ritual known only to them. Their bulbous gray heads bump together as they pass the writhing, slippery baby over their backs, churning the waves white. The whales circle and bob under the watchful eye of an aerial drone. They chatter to each other, sending out clicks louder than a jet engine as they coordinate movements. What on Earth could they be saying?

***

David Gruber was a Radcliffe Fellow in 2018 when he became fascinated by whales. In conversing with other Radcliffe fellows Shafi Goldwasser and Michael Bronstein, Gruber realized that this passing interest could become something much bigger.

A professor at the City University of New York, Baruch College, Gruber had spent much of his career trying to see the world from the perspective of animals — writing a book about jellyfish and building a shark-eye camera that allowed researchers to literally see what sharks see.

With the advent of new technology, Gruber wondered at the possibility of uncovering some of the secrets of Earth’s largest animals. “I think it was inspiring that we saw all the parts existed right now for humans to have the ability to understand sperm whales and to follow them into the depths,” says Gruber. “Everyone kind of got the chills when we realized that.”

Enter: Project CETI, short for Cetacean Translation Initiative. CETI is an interdisciplinary project consisting of over 50 academics in the fields of biology, computer science, robotics and linguistics. CETI’s scientists work within its own circular ecosystem, with each lab representing a part of the cycle of collecting and processing data to find — and eventually decode — patterns in whale “speech.”

The project came together, as Gruber narrates it, with an almost intelligent design. “An email showed up in my box from TED Audacious that said, you can get transformative amounts of social impact between 25 and 100 million, if you fill in this 500 words or something. So I just typed it into the Google box,” he says. Granted the funding, CETI became a nonprofit in 2020.

Since 2020, the project has steadily made new advancements towards its ultimate goal of decoding the language of sperm whales. Earlier this year they published a paper arguing that repeated patterns they uncovered in whale codas constitute something like a phonetic alphabet.

Not only is CETI a daring scientific undertaking that seeks to expand human knowledge via emerging technologies, but it also reveals something deeper about humanity’s desire to communicate with the alien other.

Gruber’s white whale may literally be whales, but in the pursuit of understanding the ethereal language of Earth’s largest mammals, we have to wonder — if the animals are talking, what does that mean for us?

Why Sperm Whales?

Unlike the often-villainized shark, whales seem particular magnets for human empathy, even long before CETI.

Roger Payne, principal advisor to CETI until his death in 2023, discovered that humpback whales sing songs. His 1970 LP recording “Songs of the Humpback Whale” became the best-selling nature sound record of all time. His work is credited with launching the “Save the Whales” movement, which successfully lobbied for an international moratorium on whaling.

The haunting songs of the whales inspired a generation of environmental activists. One of Payne’s recordings was included in NASA’s Golden Record, where it’s now hurtling through space some 15 billion miles away.

In his book Colonialism, Culture, Whales: The Cetacean Quartet, Graham Huggan, a professor at the University of Leeds, argues that whales are the embodiment of melancholy and a symbol of transience, disappearance, and loss. “Whale’s eyes have no tear ducts: we do their crying for them,” he writes.

Gruber credits the fascination with whales to their size. “They capture the dream center of our brain, because the blue whale is bigger than any dinosaur that ever existed,” he says. He brings up his experience diving with sperm whales. “You’re swimming with an animal that’s like, 40 feet. It’s bigger than a bus and this huge eye that looks at you,” he says.

“Whales are one particularly striking illustration of that world that we have become disconnected from,” says César Rodríguez-Garavito, the director of the More Than Human Life project at NYU and an advisor to CETI.

I asked Gruber whether he thought that excitement around CETI was “Mellvillesque.” He told me that he encountered Melville’s copy of Thomas Beale’s “The Natural History of the Sperm Whale” in Houghton Library while he was a Radcliffe Fellow. Melville was inspired by Beale to write Moby Dick. Gruber downloaded a PDF of Melville’s copy of Beale’s book, bound it, and now keeps it on his shelf. “There was a lot of biology in Moby Dick that I found interesting,” he says.

The possibilities for scientific study was also a large factor in choosing a cetacean subject. Whales have long life-spans, complex culture within matrilineal societies, and regional dialects. They are capable of conscious thought and future planning, as well as experiencing compassion, love, suffering, and intuition, according to Gruber.

But for Gruber, whales are also interesting for their differences from humans. “If you’re studying primates, it’s just too close to a human, whereas whales are very evolutionarily fascinating,” he explains. Whales and humans share a common mammalian ancestor. About 50 million years ago, the ambulatory animal that would evolve into whales walked back into the ocean for good.

Gruber explains that their deep-sea environment led to surprising adaptations like echolocation. “They’re almost like the bats of the ocean,” he says.

Gašper Beguš, a linguist at University of California, Berkeley working on Project CETI explains that sperm whales “have really developed this amazing auditory apparatus.”

Other animals might be communicating through several mediums at once, but the conditions of the whales’ environment means that scientists can be reasonably confident that all of their communication happens through sounds. “Chimps have a lot of gestures, and even this non audio communication, whereas the ocean is dark, below some level, and the light propagates differently,” he says.

“And also, whales don’t have hands,” he adds.

Of all cetaceans, why sperm whales? Sperm whales communicate in “codas,” which are morse-code-like clicks. Project CETI found these codas particularly well-suited to machine-learning analysis. Conveniently, CETI’s lead biologist Shane Gero already had 15 years of data on sperm whales as part of his former work on the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. CETI was able to begin with that data and scale up.

Gruber also stresses the “tight social culture” of the sperm whales as a motivation for further study. Last year, Gruber’s team witnessed the birth of a baby sperm whale, who was held aloft by eleven adult females for six hours until it could swim on its own. “We think it might be one of the most collective, assisting, collaborative birth efforts across all species,” he hypothesizes.

The moment was a highlight of Gruber’s career. “I was just wishing: What if Melville was on this boat with us, but we did have Elizabeth Kolbert from the New Yorker with us, so I guess maybe that was even better,” says Gruber.

But to understand whale culture, first they needed to be able to listen.

Juxtaposing Intelligences

On the door to Rob Wood’s lab in the Science and Engineering Complex in Allston, a sticker features Wood’s face superimposed on the lab’s logo — a Harvard Veritas icon sprouting insectoid legs and wings. The chimera is an allusion to Wood’s work on “Robobees,” tiny bots with a three-centimeter wingspan. Upon entering his microrobotics lab, I find myself surrounded by brightly colored robots serving a myriad of otherworldly purposes.

Wood, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences, met Gruber when they collaborated in designing coral reef grabber arms. Wood shows me a prototype of the arm, made of plastic tentacles attached to what looks like a bicycle pump. The design minimizes harm to the coral reef by applying the minimum amount of pressure necessary to interact with the species for scientific research. “Then David had this crazy idea for talking to whales, and again, that sort of excited us, with some hardware challenges,” says Wood.

The problem was observing the whales without human intrusion. “If you really want to observe a whale, you have to be more invisible,” Gruber says. Most of Wood’s work on Project CETI consists of building robotic devices that can collect data from the sperm whales while minimizing the impact on the whales themselves. “How can we interact with marine life in a very delicate way?” says Wood.

Wood takes me around the lab, showing me the tag that his team has designed to attach to the back of the giant whales. This is no small feat. Sperm whales swim upwards of 23 miles per hour and dive to depths where the pressure is up to 224 times that of the atmosphere at sea level. Wood’s task was to create a computer that could cling to a wet, moving, constantly shedding surface and withstand both the shear force of the moving water and the pressure of the deep.

The device, which is bright red and resembles a tiny torpedo with four purple suction cups on the back side, contains microphones, hydrophones, and several other sensors to collect data on the whale. Wood explains that once the device is placed on the back of a whale, it will freeride for several days before popping off, floating to the surface, and transmitting a beacon for a drone to come and collect it. Then, CETI’s team can offload the data and start again, reattaching the robotic tag to collect more data.

CETI’s field research takes place in the small Caribbean island nation of Dominica, one of the locations where high numbers of sperm whales congregate. The walls of Wood’s lab are adorned with images of scientists driving boats through azure waters. The CETI team first used extendable poles that protruded from a motor boat to plant the robotic device on the back of the whale. But the process of maneuvering behind the massive creatures caused noise pollution and apparent annoyance to the whales.

According to Wood, whales are only at the surface for a narrow window. There, “they’re breathing, they’re socializing, they’re relaxing, right, maybe even sleeping,” he says, “and that’s for maybe 10 minutes.”

“Then they’ll dive and spend 40-50 minutes hunting, eating, and come back up and repeat,” he adds. “So when they’re at the surface, we don’t want to disturb them.” This ethos led the team to experiment with piloted drones.

The drones are about the size of a computer monitor, with four propeller blades and a claw that can grip the sides of the tag. Operators on nearby boats can maneuver the drones into position when a whale is spotted on the horizon. This allows the tagging to be quicker, more consistently successful, and “less invasive.”

From the robotics perspective, he explains, success in Project CETI consists of providing the tools to collect as much quality data as possible. The data in question is not just the codas of the sperm whales, but the contextual information that may help decode their meanings. If the whales make a certain noise when diving, for example, then researchers might be able to infer that those sounds mean “let’s dive.”

That data is then passed over to the computer scientists and linguists of CETI for processing. “We call it a pipeline, because essentially, the data is coming out of the ocean and up into the cloud,” said Gruber.

Daniela Rus, MIT Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, is one of the lead AI specialists for Project CETI. Rus, who directs the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, became involved with using computer science to study whales over 20 years ago when she met Roger Payne at a meeting of MacArthur “geniuses.” “When he spoke, I just fell in love with his whales, and he apparently fell in love with my robots,” she says.

Rus works to devise the capabilities of the computers contained within the tag. If Wood is an expert in the body of the robot — in this case, the engineering of the tag and how it will stick to the whale long enough to record data — then Rus is the mastermind behind its “brain.”

At the end of the pipeline, Beguš’ linguistics lab processes the data gleaned from Dominica using machine learning. For Beguš, the marriage of linguistics and AI with marine biology is really exciting, offering new interdisciplinary opportunities for discovery.

Taking the training data recorded in the waters of Dominica, Beguš creates “artificial baby language learners” that can recognize and mimic patterns, effectively learning how to speak whale. “Our models learn, like human babies, to speak and listen,” he explains.

Machine learning models can pick up on patterns of sound that are imperceptible to the human ear. AI, Beguš explains, “is not limited by our biology. It can hear things and see things that we humans don't.” He added that AI tools can help us leave behind our “anthropocentricity,” making it easier to perceive the world outside of our human limitations.

Recently, Beguš’ team found that certain acoustic properties of the clicks within whale codas might constitute the equivalent of vowels in human speech. This finding means whales have far more complex abilities of expression than previously thought. With an expanded understanding of the building blocks of whale language, the team inches closer to cracking the code.

With enough contextual data about the actions of the whale as it transmits a particular coda, the CETI scientists are hopeful that they can “ground the symbols,” — making the leap from recognizing patterns to ascribing meaning to language.

Still, so much of whale behavior remains a mystery. Rus explains that the team has observed whales talking over each other, repeating the same codas, and parroting the phrases of other whales. “That actually raises a natural question, are they trying to vote on what they should be doing next? We don’t know,” she says.

But decoding the mystery is not purely one-sided. After all, the meeting of human minds is in service of connecting with the largest brains on earth. As Beguš commented, “We’re really digging deeper into us as humans, juxtaposing, in a sense, the three intelligences, the human and non human and the artificial one.”

Big Whale Energy

In many ways, CETI seems like an interdisciplinary dream. “Anything is possible if we work together,” reads the website, awash in eye-catching blue. The project has pulled together top minds from across the world.

“We already have advanced the knowledge in significant ways that would not have been possible, frankly, if not for biologists and AI researchers and computer scientists and roboticists coming together,” Rus says.

But without a home in any one academic institution, CETI has to get creative with its collaboration, publicity, and fundraising strategies.

On the practical side, the CETI non-profit team coordinates a Publication Committee to keep everyone up to date on what other labs are producing. Team leads meet monthly to give status updates, keeping CETI running cohesively.

The more pressing issue is funding. After becoming a nonprofit in 2020, CETI has used funding from TED Audacious to establish CETI’s operation in Dominica and begin processing the data.

But that funding ends this upcoming year. Luckily, the nonprofit brought in more than $8 million in revenue in 2022, bringing its total assets to $13 million and counting. Part of that success comes from its marketing.

CETI, it seems, has been everywhere lately. A cresting whale emerges on Radcliffe Yard, part of an exhibition on the Radcliffe Institute’s recent flagship projects. They also participated in a science fair hosted on the Highline in New York City, and were featured by artist Joan Jonas in her work at MoMa. Besides the scientists, CETI employs a small team who focus solely on coordinating the non-profit. They work to “break through the noise” to get funding for the project, according to Fiona Korwin-Pawlowski, CETI’s Chief Strategy Officer.

Korwin-Pawlowski says the project’s “start-up culture” helps them make advancements towards ambitious goals quickly, yet being a non-profit also allows CETI to direct its impact towards social good. Whereas research can become extractive without deep investment in local communities, she argues, CETI builds structures in Dominica that intentionally uplift the local economy. With an “impact and equity lens,” CETI offers fellowships for young scientists from Dominica, and has built partnerships with the local government.

CETI is also constantly trying to reach “unexpected audiences.” “We just want CETI to be a place for everyone. No donation is too small,” says Korwin-Pawlowski. They’re trying to attract smaller donors in part via an upcoming “Listen to the Whales Campaign.”

A new CETI collaboration with perfume company D.S & Durga takes whales from the auditory to the olfactory dimension. Ambergris was historically harvested from whales and used in luxury perfumes. A rare substance made from the intestine, it was worth more than gold by weight. The new fragrance, sold for $250 a bottle, uses a synthetic alternative.

Titled “Let’s Dive,” the perfume acknowledges this “very extractive relationship with the beauty industry,” Korwin-Pawlowski says. “It was meant to be a way to tell the story, but also a little reclaiming of the industry.”

“Let’s Dive has notes of marine water, seaweed extract, wooly rock rose, synthesized ambergris, choya nakh accord, and our favorite — big whale energy,” said Ashley Zafaranlou, CETI’s Director of Partnerships & Campaigns, in a interview with Forbes.

D.S. & Durga also contributed a donation to Project CETI as part of the collaboration.

But will CETI’s big whale energy translate beyond the marketing into big impact for whales?

When is a Whale a Person?

Since joining the More Than Human Life Project at NYU, Cesar Rodríguez-Garavito has advanced a new legal framework that reimagines how law can save the planet by granting fundamental rights to nature.

A lawyer, CETI advisor, and scholar, Rodríguez-Garavito hopes that recent precedent could establish new pathways for whale protection.

The Rights of Nature argument hinges on a particular question: Can animals be people in a court of law? The Nonhuman Rights Project brought a suit before the New York Court of Appeals in 2022 arguing that Happy, an Asian elephant living in the Bronx Zoo, was entitled to better living conditions under the right to habeas corpus, or the protection against unlawful captivity. Happy’s lawyers made a novel argument that even though Happy is an elephant, she should be treated as a “person” because she was suffering under the conditions of her captivity. They argued further that autonomous, non-human animals have a fundamental “right to liberty.”

Though Happy’s sorry treatment continues, an Ecuadorian court ruled in 2022 that Estrellita, an illegally trafficked wooly monkey, was a subject of legal rights. In fact, since 2008, Ecuador has enshrined a constitutional right of nature to exist free from human exploitation, making it the first country to do so.

The discoveries enabled by CETI’s technology could have huge positive impacts on the fight to protect nature through legal structures. Rodríguez-Garavito argues that if animals were shown to have capabilities traditionally thought of as unique to humans, like “sentience, intelligence, consciousness and language,” then courts might be forced to contend more seriously with their claim to rights. “Language is kind of the highest echelon of that in that gradient of capabilities,” he adds.

“If [CETI’s] studies show that, for example, whales are communicating messages of suffering caused by maritime noise pollution,” he says, “I can see a world where the legal architecture that has been developed to protect humans from torture can be applied by analogy to the situation of whales, because this is equivalent to physical torture.”

Rodríguez-Garavito is working with CETI on “a set of ethical and legal guardrails that should guide the deployment of machine learning and robotics when it comes to understanding animal communication,” he said. MOTH advocates for the “precautionary principle,” which puts the burden of proof on scientists to actively prove that their work will not harm the animals, rather than seeking to innovate at all costs.

Even the fundamental method for data collection via recording whale codas could raise legal questions. I start every interview with the words “can I have your permission to record you,” because in Massachusetts, it is illegal to record someone without their consent. As Rob Wood asked in an interview with Harvard SEAS, “Do the whales want us to hear them? Are we invading their privacy? What if they say something that we don’t want to hear?”

Gruber clarifies from the get-go that CETI is not about humans trying to communicate with whales. “We try to not use the word ‘talking to them,’ because we see ourselves more as a listening and translation process,” he says. “The whales don’t need a talking to by humans.”

(The whales could not be reached for comment on this article.)

Macarena Montes Franceschini, a Rights of Nature fellow at the law school’s Animal Law and Policy Program focusing on animal privacy, explains that Rights of Nature might curtail some scientific ambitions. Montes, who wrote an amicus brief for the Estrellita case, supports the legal personhood of wild animals. If whales express discomfort at being recorded, “then the correct thing is to say, OK, and the project is done, and you close up the shop,” she says. “Because that would be honoring them as persons, as beings with fundamental rights.”

However, survival takes precedence. “If these types of projects can help them from dying and suffering, then I think that is the priority right now,” she adds.

‘Losing One Whale is Like Losing an Ancestor’

Aside from MOTH’s formal relationship with CETI, people are already using the legal framework of Rights of Nature to protect whales.

In practice, these efforts are rooted in indigenous knowledge and perspectives. “Many indigenous worldviews say and affirm that nature is alive,” Rodríguez-Garavito says, “everything including mountains and rocks and but also, of course, trees and animals.”

Indigenous groups across the globe have been fighting for the rights of whales for years, and have recently taken steps to ensure their protection. In March 2024, some groups of native people from Aotearoa (New Zealand), the Cook Islands, Tahiti, Tonga, Hawaii, and Rapanuii (Easter Island) gathered in the Cook Islands to sign the He Whakaputanga Moana Treaty (Declaration for the Ocean). The treaty recognizes whales as legal persons with rights, including freedom of movement, the right to thrive, and the right to a clean habitat “free from pollution, unsustainable fishing practices, ship strikes and climate change.”

As Maori conservationist Mere Takoko told the New York Times, many Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Islands feel a spiritual connection to whales and credit whale migration for guiding them to settle the islands they call home. “Without the whale, we actually would have never found all of these various islands of the Pacific,” said Takoko.

As Takoko said to CNN in June, “losing one whale is like losing an ancestor.”

On the other side of the Pacific, Indigenous people in Alaska work closely with ecological researchers to determine the effects of global warming on subsistence hunting. Recently, whales have been found with unidentified parasites, disrupting community ceremonies and raising alarms about the rapidly changing arctic climate.

States have begun to collaborate with local Indigenous leaders for environmental protection. In a landmark 2021 ruling, the Ecuadorian Constitutional Court found that excessive mining violated the rights of nature of the Los Cedros forest, and granted Indigenous people the right to be consulted on any extractive economy project in their territories.

If the nation states of the Pacific Islands involved in the He Whakaputanga Moana Treaty adopted whale personhood legislation, it would cover a significant portion of the Pacific Ocean, paving the way for greater whale protection.

Furthermore, a single sperm whale can sequester up to 66,000 pounds of carbon in its lifetime. With climate change expected to have dire impacts for all life on Earth within the next few decades, protecting whales may take on a new urgency.

“The categorical distinction between humans and non humans,” Rodríguez-Garavito says, “it’s no longer tenable.”

‘The Planetary Web of Life’

Until relatively recently, whales in Massachusetts were hunted and harvested for human commodities. In the 19th century, whaling was the third-largest industry in the state. Local archives are full of gruesome pictures of whales cut up for processing. When Gruber walks around New England, he’s struck by the realization that streetlamps and candles used to burn sperm whale oil. It makes him appreciate the “transition between seeing them as a commodity to one of the most intelligent, sophisticated communication systems that we’ve ever encountered,” says Gruber. The mere possibility of, “Hello,” turned the Leviathan into a gentle giant.

This transition speaks to one of the major questions underlying CETI: Can Western technology be a tool for connecting with nature, rather than functioning as an instrument of harm?

“Over the last 150 years, it’s pretty undeniable that technology has pulled us more apart from nature,” Gruber says. “The question is, is it possible that there are applications of technology that actually would allow us to listen to and better understand and then, hopefully, be better stewards?”

The CETI team sees their work as part of a new frontier of science. “We anticipate this technology being like a telescope, or the next microscope,” Gruber says. “Soon, it’ll be used for plants and for others, for elephants.”

Indeed, CETI is not the only lab trying to understand animal communication. Irene Pepperberg, a research professor at Boston University, has been trying to understand the cognition of African gray parrots since the 1970s. Her parrots, who speak English, understand the concept of color, engage in inferential reasoning, and even do basic math. Pepperberg’s work, and its meaning for our understanding of extra-human language, was reported on by the New York Times in the 1990s.

The conversation, it seems, is ramping up this year. On Oct. 14, the New Yorker published an exploration of a lab in Vienna that examines cognition in geese, and the Atlantic wrote on Oct. 17 about the use of AI to decode dog barks.

Would discovering complex animal culture lead to human ego death? When I ask Gruber, he replies, “if anything, that would be good for us!”

“Not that we need to be brought down,” he quickly adds. Other animal cultures, he believes, should inspire awe rather than fear.

“In the future, the biggest thing will be to try to understand, is there really anything special about us that makes us humans?” Gruber says. Perhaps future research will show human intelligence and capabilities are just a natural evolutionary progression that begins with the development of language.

“Even if they are making poetry in a different way, that would be inspiring for us,” says Gruber. For him, the underlying ethos is the excitement of discovery. “Why are we looking for life in other galaxies? What are we looking for?” he asks. “We are always searching and curious.” This innate interest is CETI’s raison d’être. “Of course we want to know what whales are saying,” Gruber says.

The name CETI was itself inspired by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence project — SETI — once affiliated with NASA. Gruber describes whales as otherworldly in their own right. “Their perception of gravity is different, because they float and their worlds are so different,” he says.

Beguš, the linguist, thinks that using AI to translate non-human languages could have extraterrestrial applications. “I was joking that, you know, if we ever get any signal from the universe, we might use this approach,” he says. “In principle, it could help you find patterns in any data.”

The alien life form SETI seeks might be much closer to home. To Rodriguez-Garavito, the message of CETI is “that human beings are not alone on earth, and that they are part of the planetary web of life.”

— Magazine writer Serena Jampel can be reached at serena.jampel@thecrimson.com.

— Associate Magazine Editor Dina R. Zeldin contributed reporting.