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  • Here, off Canada's Pacific coast, researchers are

  • hoping to make a long-held dream come true.

  • Behavioral biologists and IT experts have teamed up

  • to create programs aimed at deciphering

  • acoustic signals from animals.

  • Could artificial intelligence help to identify

  • patterns in the sounds made by marine mammals?

  • Will we soon start to understand

  • what it is that whales are talking about?

  • The coastal waters between Alaska in the U.S.

  • and Canada's Vancouver Island are where a group

  • of killer whales ororcasspend their summers.

  • A team of scientists from the DEEP AL research expedition

  • are preparing to embark. “DEEP ALstands for

  • Deep Learning Applied to Animal Linguistics.”

  • Computer scientist Elmarth from Germany's

  • University of Erlangen has spent years working on

  • automatic recognition for human speech patterns.

  • Can the same methods be adapted to animal languages?

  • Underwater microphones embedded in

  • tubes serve as the expedition's ears.

  • For three summers, teams of computer scientists

  • and biologists have set out to record orca calls

  • and document whale behavior.

  • Rachael Cheng from the Leibniz Institute for

  • Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin is looking for

  • patterns between behavior and animal vocalizations

  • that could help to decipher whale language.

  • I assume they would exchange information.

  • They may have a very, very different system which

  • may not fit into our prototype of a language.

  • Around 300 orcas are identified as "Northern Residents"

  • as they spend each summer along the coast

  • of Alaska and northern British Columbia.

  • They live in small family groups and are very communicative.

  • Do different families use different dialects?

  • And is it possible to discern the meaning of individual calls?

  • Here the researchers lower the

  • highly sensitive microphones into the water.

  • The eight hydrophones can record sounds

  • up to a frequency of 100 kilohertz.

  • That's far higher pitched than what is audible to the human ear.

  • Thanks to the network of hydrophones and acoustic triangulation,

  • the researchers will later be able to

  • calculate the positions of the whales.

  • To avoid disturbing the whales with engine noise,

  • the research trimaran is equipped with an electric motor.

  • While visibility is usually limited underwater,

  • sound waves are transmitted over considerable distances.

  • That's why a communication system

  • with loud calls is clearly beneficial.

  • They're very tight together, with frequent direction change.

  • Circling. And body twisting. Plus a lot of echolocation.

  • They are socializing, like you will see.

  • They bump into each other and rub, and frequent twisting,

  • and then jump onto each other.

  • It sounds like they talk about the plan

  • What are we going to do next?”

  • Orcas only spend about five percent of their time at the surface,

  • which makes systematic observation quite difficult.

  • The research team uses drones to

  • document the behavior of the animals.

  • Diving expeditions with whales are prohibited in Canada.

  • The scientists are looking for the

  • smallest meaningful units of communication.

  • Which whale is calling, and which one answers?

  • Are some sounds repeated more than others?

  • Biologist Elysanne Durand examines the recordings.

  • Each call comprises a series of brief pulses which

  • sound like melodic curves to human ears.

  • Each shift in sound could be meaningful.

  • While recording the whale calls, the researchers also

  • document the behavior of the animals.

  • So there's four individuals in this group here that are circling,

  • there were four back there with the male,

  • there is one I can see out of the corner of my eye coming towards us,

  • and the mom and calf.

  • So that's 8, 10, 11 individuals minimum.

  • The more data available, the easier it is to "train"

  • deep-learning programs to decipher whale language.

  • It's therefore a major advantage for the researchers that over

  • 20,000 hours of orca calls have already been collected

  • more than for any other animal species.

  • Whale researcher Jared Towers has been tasked by the

  • Canadian government with observing different orca populations.

  • Back in the 1970s, scientists here began documenting

  • individual animals as well as their group structures.

  • A108 is right underneath the boat here,

  • here she is, she is gone off ahead.

  • Jared Towers has no problem telling the orcas apart.

  • This scratch here on A108 has persisted

  • for at least a couple of years now.

  • So the way that we identify the individuals no matter what

  • population they belong to is by appearance and

  • you get used to looking for certain features

  • on an individual killer whale.

  • The dorsal fins and the patches around

  • the fins have different shapes

  • enabling scientists to catalog each of the Northern Residents.

  • Every family forms a lifelong bond.

  • What we are looking at with all these families

  • is an adult female leading the group,

  • and the fathers of their offspring don't play

  • much of a role in that family group.

  • Jared Towers works for a federal institution

  • that safeguards Canada's waters.

  • His former boss, John Ford,

  • was the first to distinguish between the disparate calls of the whales.

  • Ford's research revolutionized our understanding of the

  • communication system used by the resident orcas.

  • We are listening to calls of A-Clan whales.

  • That is the exciting part of underwater listening.

  • You are getting a window into their life that you would never see.

  • John Ford discovered that the whales use about 50 different calls.

  • Different families prefer different types of calls.

  • These were nameddialects

  • and used to help identify individual families.

  • When they are making the various stereotyped signals,

  • it's simply to keep in touch with everybody in the group

  • they exchange them, they are constantly

  • monitoring each other's location.

  • They know where they are because of their very directional hearing,

  • and they can monitor the behavioral state, the excitement level,

  • the arousal state of all the other animals in the kin group.

  • Northern Resident orcas visit pebble beaches daily.

  • You can hear them rubbing right now.

  • They're making socializing sounds and you can hear

  • the pebbles getting pushed around.

  • And they just rub all sides of their body.

  • Just in the shallow part of the beach.

  • Only a few orca groups worldwide engage in this sort of body rub.

  • This behavior is not genetic, rather it's a tradition passed on

  • within families of the Northern Residents, just like their language.

  • Back on the German-Canadian research boat,

  • it's a challenge to locate each family among the 300 individuals

  • that make up the Northern Resident population.

  • The orcas are constantly on the move in an

  • expanse of water the size of Belgium.

  • The expedition covers an area from

  • Vancouver Island to the southern tip of Alaska.

  • Seagulls indicate where schools of salmon might be.

  • And this is where orcas often hunt too.

  • Calls from the “A-Clancan be heard on the underwater microphones.

  • The team tries to determine the position of the whales.

  • They compare the calls with the catalog compiled by John Ford,

  • but they encounter discrepancies.

  • The calls of class "N9" are used by different whale families.

  • Calls from the same class should be almost identical,

  • but these differ in length, melody and harmonics.

  • Human analysis so far has amounted to only a rough classification.

  • Looking at the spectrogram I am very sure that we can

  • achieve something that rivals the human performance.

  • Two whale families approach. What calls are they exchanging?

  • Here is that call. OK, let's just record this.

  • After I hear the call the back group surfaced.

  • Then I spotted the front group turning around.

  • The researchers are interested in which group is calling,

  • which one answers, and which sounds they're using.

  • Look here, I4 is approaching the boat. You can hear lots of calls.

  • That's N23 from the GI clan.

  • There is a lot of variation also

  • and interestingly, here is the A23 family.

  • The calls look very different.

  • That's how people differentiate different matrilines.

  • If we have a lot of calls, we can try to train a classifier.

  • The programmers use algorithms orclassifiers

  • to automatically analyze millions of whale calls in order to

  • compare recurring sound patterns with recurring behavioral patterns.

  • This same method is used to decipher the meaning of

  • individual words in foreign languages.

  • For Elmarth and his team, it's no easy feat to automatically filter