In the years since Gero’s insight, and partly because of it, the potential to bridge this communications gap has grown less fanciful. One of humanity’s most enduring desires is the enchanting notion that we might one day converse with other species. The key to unlocking whale communication would be knowing who the animals are and what they’re doing as they make their sounds. But he kept coming back to a revelation that struck him as he’d listened to Drop and Doublebend: If humans were ever to decode the language of whales, or even determine if whales possessed something we might truly call language, we’d need to pair their clicks with the context. Over the next 13 years, Gero, a National Geographic Explorer, would record and get to know hundreds of sperm whales. “They were talking and playing and being siblings,” he says. He felt as if he were eavesdropping on brothers wrestling in their room. Never had Gero so desperately wished he understood what whales were saying. The whales clicked back and forth for 40 minutes, sometimes while motionless, sometimes twirling their silver bodies together like strands of rope, rarely going silent for long. But he’d never heard anything quite like this. For three years Gero had been using underwater recorders to capture codas from hundreds of whales.
Lost magic decoded history channel series#
Sperm whales “speak” in clicks, which they make in rhythmic series called codas. The animals, nicknamed Drop and Doublebend, nuzzled their enormous boxy heads and began to talk. Gero, a Canadian biologist, had been tracking sperm whales off the Caribbean island nation of Dominica when two males, babies from the same family, popped up not far from his boat. On a crisp spring morning in 2008, Shane Gero overheard a pair of whales having a chat.
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