A humpback whale named Twain traded calls with a boat speaker for 20 minutes, according to a 2023 study in the journal PeerJ. The paper reports that the encounter took place on 19 August 2021 in Frederick Sound, Southeast Alaska. Researchers from UC Davis, the SETI Institute, and the Alaska Whale Foundation played a recorded humpback call into the water, and Twain, an adult female, kept calling back while she stayed near the boat. The exchange itself relied on a speaker, two underwater microphones, and two researchers choosing when to play each call.
How the 20-minute exchange with the humpback whale worked
The day before, on 18 August 2021, the team recorded a clear “whup” call (also called a “throp”) from a loose group of nine whales, the paper says. A whup is a short contact call that humpbacks use to signal their presence to other whales. Twain was part of that group: the authors suggest the call may have come from a whale she knew, or even from Twain herself, but they could not tell.
According to the same paper, a single underwater speaker at about 6 m depth broadcast the call, while two hydrophones (underwater microphones) recorded everything. The two researchers running the playback could not see the whale and reacted only to her calls. Four observers on the upper deck noted her blows and movements without knowing the playback plan, so their records could not bias the sound analysis.
The study reports that Twain stayed within 100 m of the boat during the whole playback. Photos of her tail matched in the Happywhale database identified her as a female at least 38 years old, the authors write. Over the 20-minute playback period, the team broadcast 38 calls and recorded 36 calls from Twain, according to the paper. The same recordings contained no whale calls in the 20 minutes before or after the playback.
What the timing of the calls shows
The researchers measured one feature: the silent gap between one call and the next. The paper explains that the other sound features were unreliable, because the whale kept changing her distance and direction from the microphones. Observers split the encounter into three phases based on her behavior: engagement, agitation (marked by wheezy, forced blows linked to excitement), and disengagement as she swam away.
In the engagement phase, the delay before Twain answered was 9.9 times more likely to match the delay the researchers had just used than in the agitation phase, the study found. Her gaps between calls were also shorter when she was answering a playback than when no playback came in between. The authors describe this as vocal coordination, a form of turn-taking in which each side waits for the other before speaking. Matched timing is also a feature of human talk: when two people talk, their brains fire in sync.
The paper calls its results preliminary, because they come from a single whale and a single event. The authors also note that playbacks of 15 archived whup calls on other days drew no physical or vocal response from any whale. The study measured timing only: it makes no claim about grammar, word meaning, or the content of the calls.
Where artificial intelligence fits
Several news stories credited artificial intelligence with the exchange. The PeerJ paper describes no AI tool: the team measured the call gaps with sound-analysis software (Raven Pro) and checked them with standard statistics. The link with AI and space comes from the project, called Whale-SETI. According to the SETI Institute’s December 2023 release on the encounter, the team studies whale communication to build “filters” for signals from space, using information theory (the mathematics of how much structure a message carries).
Lead author Brenda McCowan, a professor at the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, believes this is the first such exchange between humans and humpback whales in the whales’ own calls. Other studies look at how pets communicate with people, such as cats that press talking buttons to ask for things or a slow blink that builds trust with cats.
Sources and related information
PeerJ – Interactive bioacoustic playback as a tool for detecting and exploring nonhuman intelligence: “conversing” with an Alaskan humpback whale – 2023
McCowan, Hubbard, Walker, Sharpe, Frediani, and Doyle describe the 20-minute exchange with Twain, the playback setup, the three behavioral phases, and the call-timing analysis in PeerJ, DOI 10.7717/peerj.16349. The full text is free on PubMed Central (PMC10693240).
SETI Institute – Whale-SETI: groundbreaking encounter with humpback whales reveals potential for non-human intelligence communication – 2023
The SETI Institute release presents the encounter and explains why the Whale-SETI team studies whale calls to build filters for signals from space.
UC Davis – Whale-SETI: humpback whale encounter reveals potential for non-human intelligence communication – 2023
The UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine article quotes lead author Brenda McCowan, who believes the exchange is the first of its kind between humans and humpback whales.
