Listening to Whales

- [Anne] Hey friends, it's Anne. Have you noticed that whales have been popping up a lot lately? Startling people on boats and beaches, but also in science labs. For the first time ever, researchers who study whale communication think they might actually be close to understanding it. AI technologies are helping decode those beautiful, deep whale calls and songs. Which raises profound questions about the rights and-

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- [Anne] It's "To the Best of our Knowledge", I'm Anne Strainchamps. I've spent my life listening and talking to people, which is pretty normal for a human. But this planet is awash in other species, above and below the ground, in the skies, in the oceans. We humans are not the only ones speaking. Ever wish you could translate?

- [Shane] I was off the coast of Dominica. Not too far, maybe two or three miles. And we're on a very small boat. You know, something that you might use to get around the Intracoastal Waterway, but we're off in the middle of the ocean.

- [Anne] This is marine biologist Shane Gero.

- [Shane] We're sitting there, the engine's off, it has been off for a little while. We're with these two calves that we call Drop and Double Bend. Neither of them is more than three or four years old. And they're playing and socializing, rolling around, just sperm whales being sperm whales. We're sort of there eavesdropping alongside them with our tiny little hydrophone recording the giant amphitheater that is whatever's below the surface that we don't get to see every day. We're sitting in water that's taller than the tallest building. You know, water so deep that light never penetrates into the bottom, but this is the sperm whale's home. And these two little whales are chatting with each other. You know, in the same way that human kids do. Saying things to each other, and I just can't understand them. We've been studying sperm whales for decades at this point. You know, my PhD supervisor, Hal Whitehead, was one of the first people to go out and show that you could follow the lives of sperm whales out on a small boat and produce excellent science. Which, at the time, without killing them, was a big part of the story. And here we are, having known these calves since they were born, listening to what they're saying and wondering what is it like to grow up as a sperm whale, but in such a foreign part of our shared planet. The deepest, darkest parts of the ocean that we find difficult to even explore decades after the Space Race. We had landed on the moon long before we really spent any time paying attention to the deep, dark ocean. And here's a family just on the other side of the surface talking to one another. And even after decades of listening, we've only started to scratch the surface about what they might be saying to each other.

- [Anne] Marine biologist Shane Gero has spent decades listening to whale conversations. He's had some breakthroughs recently working for Project CETI. That's CETI with a C. Stands for Cetacean Translation Initiative, which is where they're using AI technologies to try to decode whale language. From his home in Ottawa, Canada, Gero tells Shannon Henry Kleiber about his whale family in Dominica and what they're helping us understand.

- [Shannon] I love how you have such curiosity about what these whales are saying to each other. What did it sound like?

- [Shane] Yeah, I mean, the first time I heard sperm whale codas, it sounded, to be honest, kind of simple. It's a series of clicks and pauses, not sort of unlike ode. It's amazing because we've learned so much about their social lives in Dominica, about who the whales are as individuals and what they do in their family and how they babysit one another, and how these different families spend time with each other. This rich sort of complicated life that's happening. And so it must be mediated in some way by the sounds they make to one another, but exactly what that is, is sort of unknown. And so we record huge amounts of these codas, these patterns of clicks, as the whales talk to one another when they're diving, when they're socializing as a family, or when calves are playing with each other, like Drop and Double Bend were on that day.

- [Shannon] So I wanna know what they're saying. Are they just saying, "Come here," or saying something that has emotion, or? Why do you think that people are so fascinated with what whales are saying?

- [Shane] I think we've been, humans have been thinking about what animals are saying for centuries. Every kid at some point between 6 and 12, doesn't matter what country you're from, what continent you live on, gets struck by how amazing the world is. And maybe it's rocks, maybe it's bugs, maybe it's birds, maybe it's whales. And the realization that there's this entirely complex, amazing, dynamic thing going on in parallel to our own small world inside our own brain.

- [Shannon] Shane, you've been following these clans of whales in Dominica for decades. You kind of get to know them like part of your family.

- [Shane] Oh, absolutely. My kids have bath toy sperm whales that all have names of real sperm whales in Dominica. That's great.

- [Shane] You know, we call them my whale family as opposed to my human family here in Ottawa, back in Canada. We found a population, a community of sperm whales that were easier to study. Traditionally, these were nomadic, open ocean animals and we would live on small sailboats and be 200 miles from shore and spend as long as we could with sperm whales, but then we'd run out of food or water or gas and have to go home. In Dominica, we've identified 35 different families now, and there's probably another 16 or 17 other sperm whale families that spend a lot of time in the waters off Dominica. So, they have high residency, so we see them for a number of days in a row and then they will leave and another family will move in. And the re-sighting rate is high, meaning we see this family this week, this month, next month, next year and year on year on year. And that means we can really drill in and ask questions about who the animals are as individuals. How is this one a mom? When were they born? When were they first a mom? These really kind of delicate parts of their family life. How does the babysitting work in family A versus family B versus family C? Because, unsurprisingly, every family is different. These are big-brained mammals. The community's probably less than 600 animals and that's divided into different cultural groups. So, sperm whale families behave differently, they have different diets, different habitat use, different movement patterns. And they label those differences by differences in their vocal dialects, different repertoires of these coda patterns. And some of those codas are symbolic of the set of families they're from.

- [Shannon] So really like a dialect?

- [Shane] Yeah, in the same way that, at least in certain instances, I spend a lot of time saying, "I am Canadian," because that becomes important, say, at a border or during the Olympics, or whatever it might be, sperm whales appear to take a lot of time broadcasting their identity. And in the Caribbean they make a coda that's not recorded anywhere else in the world and it's called the one plus one plus three. And it sounds like click, click. Click, click, click.

- [Shannon] What does that mean?

- [Shane] That's a great question in terms of the exact information that's encoded in that. But the way that we think it functions is as a symbolic marker of belonging to a clan. To all the families that share the same dialect, that share the same behavior, the same habitat, use the same movement pattern, the same diet, the same social behavior, and probably a myriad of different cultural variations to how to live a sperm whale life. Culture, whether it's humans or whales, is really just a set of solutions on how to survive in the world that you live in, right? So behavior's what you do, but culture is how you've learned to do it. Humans are all humans, but some eat with chopsticks, some eat with forks, some eat fish on Fridays, some never eat beef, but those are how you learnt to live your life. We still all eat and move and love and care for our babies and mourn and have funerals, but how we do all of those different things you learn as you grow up as a baby. And that seems to be true in sperm whales too.

- [Shannon] Shane, have you had any notable surprises in your work? Something that has just really taken you aback or been most exciting or just really surprised you?

- [Shane] I mean, the whales find ways to surprise me all the time. But I think the intangibles that we can't talk about in science yet. So, when we first started doing research, we'd get behind a whale and the whale would lift its tail in that sort of quintessential whale watch moment and we take a photo 'cause we identify them by the trailing edge of their tail. And then when they dive, they leave this calm circle of water, sort of where the whale just was, called the fluke print. And we would go and we would collect skin and feces and we'd drop our hydrophone in the water. And this one whale, named Can Opener, realized that pattern. She, like, saw something novel in her environment and that we did the same thing over and over again. And then, at least as an outsider, it's hard not to see this as future planning, which is something very hard to show in animals. So, Can Opener would fake her dive. She would lift her tail out, dive, and then wait for us just under the surface. And when we would pull into the flute print and drop the hydrophone, she would blow all the bubbles out of her blowhole and come to the surface. And importantly, she didn't echolocate on the boat, she didn't use her sound to see the hull that was below the surface, she would roll her eye out of the water and follow the people, the biologists, who at this point are giddy to have this sperm whale pay attention to them and look at them, run up and down the boat. The acknowledgement-

- [Shannon] It sounds like she was playing a game with you.

- [Shane] Oh yeah, we would play hide-the-hydrophone, because she wouldn't go about her business. So we'd have to wait longer and let her actually start a dive before bringing the hydrophone in. Or she would run her jaw along the length of the hydrophone, sort of inspecting it. 'Cause they can't touch things with their pectoral flippers, right? So, that to me breaks through what we can show quantitatively in the science of what these animals are and who they are, but it sort of propels us to be like, "Well, how do we devise science to understand that to be true? How do we show that using the process of science?" And that's really tricky.

- [Shannon] One of the things I think is so interesting about this time is that technology is helping you do this, and it's kind of ironic yet beautiful that technology can help us understand nature better. You're using artificial intelligence and robotics. Is that helping this moment really in understanding whales better?

- [Shane] Totally, in so many different ways. Marine science has always been a technological science, even back to, like, we needed boats to go out on the ocean to learn about what was in the ocean. A big part of learning a new language is hearing it a lot. And so just the challenge of recording large amounts of audio has been met through novel ways in Project CETI by creating new technology to do the recording, to record continuously, to record on the backs of the whales, to record autonomously through things like gliders, which are small autonomous submarines that can sort of patrol off the island of Dominica and listen for whales when humans can't be at sea. So that's one way where technology is bringing us a huge step forward. There are a number of problems in the way we studied sperm whale codas that were limiting. So for example, if you wanted to learn English and you put one microphone and only one microphone in a dentist's office, you would think the word root canal is critically important to English speaking society. When really it's just a huge bias in the context in which you're recording. Breaking out of that and being able to record across context and continuously, helps us learn a broader swath of language than we would otherwise. But then you face this massive problem of, well, now we have hundreds of hours of audio, so what do we do? And that's where things like machine learning and and neural network processing has accelerated a lot of things. It used to take 8 to 12 minutes of human time per minute of recording to just extract the sperm whale codas out of the recordings. And now that can be largely automated by teaching neural networks to sort of detect, annotate, classify each of the calls. And that allows us to have a much bigger data set to answer these questions about what animals are saying. That's the first step. But, like, what is the variability? It's not just changing in rhythm from bub bub bub bubba-bub to bubba-bubba bub. They change the tempo when maintaining the rhythm. So you can have bub bub bub bubba-bub and you can have bub bub bubba-bub.

- [Shannon] So it might be the same words, but a different meaning?

- [Shane] Before we knew that variability existed, we would treat those as one thing. Now that we know that variability exists, we can ask that question, "Is it emotional state?" Like, I tend to speak higher and faster when I'm excited or scared. So then you need to take all of that variability that you've discovered and look at it in where and when they're doing those things. Is it before diving? Is it when they're babysitting? And then who they're doing it with. Is it only with elders? Is it they talk slower when they're talking to calves, as a lot of adults do? So then you have the what and the who and the where and the when. Then you can start asking the why. What kinds of information might they be exchanging? Why are they talking to each other? Why make sound now as opposed to any other time? And that's where the AI, or neural networks or whatever sort of word you wanna apply to it, is really excellent at drawing patterns between different types of data streams.

- [Shannon] Are you putting sounds that would be whale sounds that AI has created down into the water too to communicate with the whales?

- [Shane] So we're not doing that yet. From my perspective, project CETI is a large-scale listening project. We're trying to understand what whales say to one another when whales are being whales. And there may come a point where we need to ground our ideas of what these things mean. Answering that why question, the meaning of these sounds, where we may need to play sounds back to sperm whales. The project is geared at learning from the animals rather than centering it around people and what we might wanna say to them.

- [Shannon] We're trying to understand more by listening.

- [Shane] How much good could we do in the world by all just listening to someone so different from us for just a little while? Figuring out what's important to them, and then instead of asking what are we gonna do about it, we ask what can we do in changing our behavior in order to make the world better for them. And then there's the second question later of, like, do they even want to have a conversation with us? And I think doing that centers humans in a way that is not a part of my ethos on studying animals. There's a great quote from Cormac McCarthy, who of course was a longtime friend of Roger's, where in one of his writings he wrote, "What if God comes back and asks you if you've figured it all out? And before you can answer, he asks, 'Did you think about asking the whales?' And in looking around said, 'Where have all the whales gone?'" And I think that's this whole sort of, like, well, what lessons can we learn by listening to them first before we worry about whether or not they're even interested in hearing about what we have to say? Because a big takeaway about being a sperm whale is be a good neighbor. And fundamentally, humanity has not been a particularly good neighbor to any of the citizens of the ocean. So I would probably understand if they were pretty hesitant.

- [Anne] That's Shane Gero, founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project and biology lead on Project CETI, talking with Shannon Henry Kleiber. You know, Gero mentioned the writer Cormac McCarthy and his friend Roger, he was talking about the late Roger Payne, the famous whale biologist. So coming up we'll hear from Payne himself on what it's like to swim right up to a whale, without getting hurt.

- [Roger] They know exactly where their bodies are. One of the things they do, which I interpret as a threat, is that they will move their tail past you getting very, very close in such a way that they almost, but not quite, hit you. And that sort of action I think is equivalent to sort of making a fist at somebody as though you're gonna hit them but not hitting them.

- [Anne] I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To the Best of our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX. If you were gonna pinpoint the moment, the exact time and place, when whale songs were first heard, you'd go back to 1967. To a research vessel just off the coast of Bermuda, where two young whale biologists made the discovery of a lifetime.

- [Carl] Roger Payne was working with his wife, Katie, in the Caribbean, and they were contacted by a naval engineer, I believe, who said, "We've been doing some underwater recordings." And they started hearing some very, very weird noises. And whistles and they seem to be coming from incredible distances away, incredibly loud. And the engineers suspected maybe these are whales that are making this kind of sound, because he couldn't really imagine anything else doing it. And so the Paynes followed up on that idea and investigated. And then yes, lo and behold, it was humpback whales that were making these, what come to be called, songs. Roger Payne actually released an album of whale songs and it became just this total pop culture hit.

- [Roger] One of the loveliest nights I have ever spent at sea was on April 13th, 1970. Our little boat bowed and dipped and turned among the high waves left over from a storm.

- [Carl] This was coming out right around the time that, you know, Earth Day was kicking off and the environmental movement was moving along. There also became this effort to save the whales.

- [Roger] The recording you will now hear was carried on board a Voyager spacecraft into outer space.

- [Anne] That's New York Times science reporter Carl Zimmer. He's been following whale science for decades, but we wanted to begin with the Paynes because none of this would've happened without them. Roger Payne died in 2023, but Steve, I remember you interviewing him.

- [Steve] Yeah, it was back in 1995 and he'd just come out with a memoir called "Among Whales", which was all about what it was like to spend time sort of out in the sea with these huge creatures. He had this gift for making whales come alive. When he talked about whales, you felt like you were out in the boat with him.

- [Roger] It's something that you're not prepared for. It doesn't matter how long you've thought about it, you can't prepare yourself for it. And it's also a thrill that you never forget.

- [Steve] How close can you get?

- [Roger] You can touch them. They allow you to come very close, they're unafraid. There is a kind of a strange lack of aggression. I mean, if you walked up to an elephant as close as you can walk up to a blue whale, you probably wouldn't survive it. Certainly not if the elephant had a calf with her. But I think the biggest thrill I ever had with right whales was when I swam up next to a female and she was asleep, her eye was closed, she was breathing at a very lowered rate and so on. And eventually she opened her eye and then I could see her move the eyeball and look me up and down. And then she closed it and went back to sleep. I mean, you get the idea sort of, "Hey, you've seen one of these, you've seen them all."

- [Anne] Wow, I can't believe you dug that tape out of the archives. So what about the other biologist who was working with him, his wife, Katie Payne?

- [Steve] So she did a lot of that early research analyzing whale songs. And then she and Roger got divorced and Katie went on to do this groundbreaking research on elephant sounds.

- [Anne] Elephants?

- [Steve] Yeah, she discovered that they could communicate over many miles using low frequency vocalizations.

- [Anne] Whoa, so it's kind of like they divvied up the world's giant sentient creatures, you know?

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Ane] She got the land and he got the sea. Well, Roger Payne went on to become this incredibly famous kind of celebrity whale conservationist. What do you think he would've thought about this moment? I mean, did you talk with him about what he thought about the future of whales?

- [Steve] I did. And remember, this was nearly 30 years ago when we didn't know that oceans were gonna warm up as much as they did. But even then I asked him did he think that whales could for centuries to come, and he wasn't too sure about that.

- [Roger] Um, I don't know. I fear not. If we get smart quick, yes. But unless we get smart quick, no. I fear-

- [Steve] Getting smart quick means, for one thing, stopping whaling, I presume?

- [Roger] Well, that's just, yeah, that's almost a minor thing. Whaling now is a very small source of the death of whales. The thing that really bothers whales now, or which threatens whales now, is the slow accumulation of toxic stuff in the seas, pollution. Unless we do something to stop the accumulation of toxic stuff in the oceans, not only will we lose access to fish in the sea because they'll be too poisoned to eat them safely, but we will lose whales and other species. And that to me is an obscenity that is so foul, it enrages me. And I feel that if that is the mistake that we make, then it could seriously have been asked whether indeed there was intelligent life on earth.

- [Anne] Oh, sobering. So, Roger Payne is gone, but as we've heard, whale biology keeps advancing. Introduce our next guest.

- [Steve] So, Carl Zimmer is a longtime New York Times science reporter and he's been tracking this decades-long effort to decode what whales are actually singing about. Is it some kind of language? So, recent discoveries about whales have been really one of the great stories of his career.

- [Carl] When I was starting out as a journalist, we really didn't know where whales came from. We just didn't. Charles Darwin had suggested maybe whales had evolved from some kind of four-legged land mammal, and people laughed at him. It was so absurd. How could you get a whale from some land mammal? But, you know, like, Darwin could see, like, whales nurse their young, they have all of these key hallmarks of being mammals. And so right then when I was starting as a reporter, paleontologists were just starting to find fossils of whales with legs. I wrote my first book largely about this transition called "At the Water's Edge". They've fascinated me ever since because not only did they go into the water, but they have become real dominant players in the oceans. And on top of all of that, they evolved these gigantic brains. They really are our main rivals in terms of cognitive complexity. And yet, all this time later, actually the evolution of whales is really well filled in now. I can show you so many whales with legs, it's boring now. We know that hippos are their closest land relatives, we know all that. Boom, it's all there now. But there's so much left to understand about whales, especially what's going on in their heads.

- [Steve] And so we seem to be in another whale moment, especially about what seems to be new discoveries about the language, the possible language of whales. Can you tell us about this?

- [Carl] Yeah, I mean, scientists can go after some of the big enduring puzzles about whale song. Whale songs were discovered in the 1960s, a lot of advances have been made over the years since then, but there's still so much we just do not understand. We fundamentally don't yet know what it's for. We just don't, we don't.

- [Steve] So this major question, they're making all of these incredible sounds. We don't know why.

- [Carl] That's right. And different species make different sounds. They just sound profoundly different, they have different patterns and so on. So they could be doing lots of different things. We're still just exploring ideas of what it's for. So it's still gonna be a long time before we humans decipher all this.

- [Steve] So there's this huge question about whether whales have language, and I sort of wanna put this in a larger context. I mean, why is there so much riding on this question of not just whether whales have language, but whether other animals have language?

- [Carl] We know that language is really important to our own species. There have been scientists who argue that without language we would have been just yet another ape. And yet, with language we have reshaped the world, we have produced a complex society that the planet has never seen before. We use language to shape our own identities. Language is everything to us. Then when we look out at the animal kingdom, we're like, well, it doesn't really seem like anything else is doing language the way we do. There are some language-y things out there-

- [Steve] Right. I mean, we know that birds sing and insects communicate through sounds and all of that, but-

- [Carl] Sure.

- [Steve] That's not exactly what we're talking about.

- [Carl] It's not. If a cricket is singing, it is singing its species song. Basically, like, you know, crickets are singing to attract a mate. That is fundamentally different than human language. I'm speaking to you in words. Those words are made up of vowels and consonants, which combine into syllables. I'm combining those syllables in lots of different ways to make words. And I'm combining those words in lots of different orders in order to tell you something. And there's practically no limit to the things that I could convey to you with this system. We humans are really, really, really fascinated by language. And we wanna understand how did language evolve in us and has it evolved in any other species? Is there anything like language out there or is it just us?

- [Steve] Yeah, and I know there are some scientists who think that actually you need language in order to think. That was Noam Chomsky's big theory many decades ago, and I know there's been a lot of debate about that since then. But it seems like there's a lot at stake in terms of the cognitive ability of another species about this use of language.

- [Carl] Yeah, I mean we clearly have language. Homo sapiens has language. Chimpanzees do not, as far as we can tell, have language. Certainly not, like, a full-blown language. So why? Why did we evolve it? So, some people have argued, well, it was a way for us to think more complex thoughts. Many of us have a voice running in our head. When we talk about our thoughts, we get the impression that we think in words. But actually there are a lot of neuroscientists these days who would argue, no, actually there's no evidence for that. There is a language network, a language circuit in our brains that has been very carefully mapped out in recent years. And so when we are doing tasks that involve language, boop, it lights up.

- [Steve] Yeah.

- [Carl] But you can ask people to do all sorts of complex forms of thought and that language circuit is quiet. So they actually argue language specifically evolved for communication. We were these small groups of apes and once we could communicate we could cooperate at a level that other apes just couldn't do.

- [Steve] So we should talk about the kinds of sounds that whales make and can you talk a little bit more about these alphabets that people are starting to decipher, these codes, especially among the sperm whales. What are scientists discovering?

- [Carl] So in the 1970s, scientists who studied sperm whales recognized that all these little clackity clack Morse code type sounds they were hearing actually fell into certain patterns, and these are known as codas. These codas actually can be a set of three pulses quickly in a row, five pulses slowly spaced out and then a couple quick ones after that. So recently some scientists who study sperm whales, marine biologists, teamed up with computer scientists who are experts in signal processing and artificial intelligence. It didn't take long for them to discover that, whoa, actually there's actually even more structure to these than we thought. So you can take a set of clicks in a coda and it turns out that sperm whales will sometimes stretch that out. So instead of taking a second, it might take a second and a half and then stretch it back down again and then stretch it out again. So they're actually playing with the timing. The pattern's the same, but the timing is different. Every now and then a whale might take a coda and just throw in an extra click at the end. So what this does is this kind of, like, suddenly expands the number of different kinds of ways in which these sperm whales can communicate. So these scientists are saying, like, this is a lot like our phonetic alphabet. In English, there's a certain set of consonants and vowel sounds combined, phonemes. Buh, duh, so on. But these are the keys to language. We combine them into words. So it seems like sperm whales are the only other species that we know of right now that has a phonetic alphabet. Do they use it the way we are, to speak? For language that carries information? We have no idea at all. But it's pretty exciting that we're looking at a species with some of the components of language that we haven't seen before in the natural world.

- [Steve] We don't know, in other words, if they are communicating information in some way or maybe they're just, I don't know, singing.

- [Carl] Yeah, so I would agree with that. One idea is that sperm whales, and maybe other whales, can use a kind of language to actually communicate complex information. Other people say we don't have to get hung up on whether this is actually saying something, it doesn't have to say anything. You know, we talk about whale songs as if it's music. Well, maybe it is music.

- [Steve] But I guess I'm wondering what it would take to be able to actually understand, potentially, the content of these sounds. How would we know, if we could figure out what they're saying?

- [Carl] It's a real challenge. That's the stuff of science fiction. Like, you know, the movie "Arrival".

- [Steve] Right. About trying to, you know, contact aliens from another planet. It's a similar project, right?

- [Carl] It is similar in some ways, yes. And so, in the movie "Arrival", Amy Adams plays a linguist who is brought in to try to figure out how to communicate with aliens who have shown up on the planet. And the challenge she has is that she's got no bearing. She can't say like, "Oh, well, it's an Indo-European language. And so I'll just guess that it's something like English or French or one of the other Indo-European languages." You can't do that. It's a very similar case with whales that you can't assume that they're playing by your rules. We don't even know if it's language. And if it was language, how would you even show it? One possibility is that maybe with the help of AI you could actually not just recognize new features of whale songs, but you could, in a sense, decipher it. You could start to say like, "Oh, well, this pattern means this." Make enough associations that you could sort of have kind of a Rosetta Stone as it were.

- [Steve] And you mentioned earlier, it's sort of like Morse code. If you can detect what Morse code is all about, then you can tap back a message and communicate. And I guess that's the dream here.

- [Carl] Yeah, it's not hard to sound like a sperm whale. I mean, we can do that. We can fake sperm whale songs. The problem is that they're so complex. One sperm whale will be clicking along, another sperm whale will start clicking over them. And then that first sperm whale may, like, immediately adjust its clicking within a millisecond. So the elements of sperm whale communication are pretty easy to mimic, but it might be kind of hard to really pass yourself off as a sperm whale. But one possibility that you can dream about is that someday it might be possible for scientists to drop a speaker down into the water and as a group of sperm whales are swimming by, blast out a message and see how they react. See how they react in terms of their behavior. Do they swim to come check it out or do they send out a response of their own? Maybe that would be a test of whether in fact they are using language as we understand it.

- [Steve] Yeah. This has been so much fun, thank you.

- [Carl] Thank you. Thanks for having me.

- [Anne] Carl Zimmer is the author of more than a dozen science books and he's a writer for the New York Times, and he was talking with Steve Paulson. Coming up, New Zealand conservationists are working on legislation to give whales legal personhood, and a voice at the UN. I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To the Best of our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX. Humans ask a lot from whales, but what do we owe them?

- [Mere] I think I've always been obsessed with whales since quite a young age. Being a descendant of Paikea the whale rider.

- [Anne] Mere Takoko, an indigenous ocean and climate conservationist.

- [Mere] Every time I see a whale and I interact with a whale, I always do a karakia, a chant or prayer, to give thanks to that being and to connect with that being. Swimming with the whales, the same thing. I guess, my own way that I talk with the whale is to connect my heart to their heart. And then essentially just talk to the whale. I don't talk about my problems of course , but I do talk about, you know, I ask for their assistance on this mission. It's not an easy mission. I call it a little bit of a check-in. I always check in with the whale, I make sure I'm on track.

- [Anne] What have you heard back?

- [Mere] It's more about a resonancy for me, a particular vibration I'll feel in my body, which is a yes or a no. That's, I guess, the best way I can explain it. There's a certain tingle you'll get, like a feeling of light that just floods your body and that's usually a yes. So that's , but that's a very personal thing.

- [Anne] Yeah.

- [Mere] I think it's different for everyone. But it's something that I apply not just with whale, but other sentient species. And I think that's something that a lot of spiritually-minded Maori do. Not just with the whale, but the forests , the birds. It's important to us.

- [Anne] Mere Takoko is a Maori conservationist in New Zealand who's spearheading an international effort to grant legal personhood to whales, starting in her own country. She says it makes sense for the Maori to lead this issue because indigenous Polynesians consider whales their ancestors.

- [Mere] We have an inherent belief system which teaches us that the whale is our ancestor. And so we are very lucky that in the north of where we come from, in a place that was traditionally called that is one of the few places where whales will converge. And in fact, we have many stories that give accounts of ancestors like mine, Paikea, who rode these whales to New Zealand after being saved from potential catastrophic events and drownings.

- [Anne] Wow, wait, they rode the whales? Not just followed them, rode on them.

- [Mere] That's right. You may have heard about the story of the Whale Rider, it's a movie. So this particular ancestor Paikea, he much preferred the company of , a marine species of the ocean, over people. So he formed a very strong bond with a particular pet whale. And after his brother tried to drown him to be able to usurp his title, his chieftain title, he in fact called to that whale to come and save him and rode the whale all the way to New Zealand.

- [Anne] Wow. I'm trying to imagine what it would be like if I grew up in a culture where everybody I knew believed that whales were our ancestors, that we were literally related to them. I don't know. How do you feel like that affected you growing up?

- [Mere] Well, I think it's just such a part and parcel of our culture and our worldview. We see the moana, you know, the ocean, we see all the species that live within the ocean as kin, and therefore it strengthens your connection with everything that exists around you. So growing up, listening to these stories, it's not magic, it's not legend, for us these are real events that occurred. So, I'm incredibly proud of that. And I think what it imbues is this relationship with the whales, which is deeply spiritual.

- [Anne] So, New Zealand has granted personhood to rivers. Other countries have done this for bees and for turtles. And you are working on an effort to grant whales legal personhood. So what does this mean?

- [Mere] Well, let me just take you back a little bit to the beginning of this. So we went last year to the New York Climate Week and presented resolution to United Nations calling for whales to be recognized as UN ambassadors of the ocean and also legal personhood. And that of course started this wider discussion. So we designed and developed a treaty: He Whakaputanga Moana.

- [Anne] The name means declaration of the ocean, right?

- [Mere] That's right. We wanted to go beyond traditional conservation. But coming to the legal personhood itself, I do believe it's one of the most useful instruments that we can use. The rights of nature movement, as we know, is growing globally. I think there's going to be a huge upswell of countries throughout the world who will take this on. So for us, yes, legal personhood is about acknowledging their intrinsic value as taonga, as sacred treasures, and their right to exist. You know, it's about recognizing their intelligence, their complex social structures, their vital role also in maintaining the balance of our oceans, as eco engineers of our oceans.

- [Anne] So let's just break this down a little bit in terms of what kind of rights legal personhood would give whales. I'm assuming first and foremost would be the right to life. You know, so many whales are being decimated because of entanglement in nets, accidental whale strikes. What would change with legal personhood?

- [Mere] Well, for one, and there's a number of things, but I'll just give you an example. The whale, with these new rights, also can be transformed into an asset that the market is going to recognize. With our valuation of whales, which is based on Dr. Ralph Chami's work, former director of International Monetary Fund, those whales have been valued at 2 million per whale.

- [Anne] How do you decide a whale is worth 2 million?

- [Mere] This is just based on the eco services that the whale provides the oceans, the carbon that it sequesters, and the overall benefits that it has for biodiversity. Once you recognize the whale as having this particular value, those shipping companies are now going to be liable for a $2 million asset.

- [Anne] Per whale?

- [Mere] Per whale. That's going to mean that they're suddenly going to have to look at their insurance policies , and obviously a premium. They're going to have to look at ways to ensure that they're not going to hit a whale instead of what they do now, which is they won't slow down because they have to get their goods to port as soon as possible. So this is about disincentivizing striking a whale. And also to go beyond that, to create incentives for good behavior. Remote sensing, anti-collision devices, there's many others. So for us, personhood isn't merely symbolic. I think that's where we will be unique with this particular approach to personhood that no one else in the world has yet to pilot.

- [Anne] Sounds like you see the rights of nature movement as the beginning of a new narrative in conservation, a model in which indigenous cultures take the lead.

- [Mere] Yeah, I think it's definitely where the global narrative is heading. Scientists are starting to finally recognize that indigenous people have been looking after these habitats and doing it well for centuries and for millennia. And that really, at the source of it, comes down to the driving values and the worldview underpinning our practices and the way that we interact with nature. And now, I think, especially the younger generation of scientists that are coming through, have much more exposure to indigenous philosophies and paradigms and they can see the value of them. You know, science and traditional knowledge can be complimentary systems. Our indigenous science has been built up from years and years of observation. Science can often be contained to very small timeframes, and so therefore you don't see the longer cycles and patterns of nature which indigenous knowledge has observed.

- [Anne] Yeah, and just thinking about that knowledge almost as a database, how far back do your calendars and does that lore go?

- [Mere] Thousands of years. I mean, if you look at every ancient civilization, we all use the same star system for our calendar systems. So, Egypt has a very similar calendar system to Maori. And the Aztecs, the Maya, even Sumerians had the same system. And my belief, and the research I've done, are the Milky Way and some of the stars of the Milky Way are universal science. And we have tohunga who could tell you so much information around these particular stars. We voyaged by these stars, and in fact the whales also voyaged using these stars. And in fact, my theory is that there was a lot of information transferred from following the whale on our migratory journeys as well, that our ancestors also adopted.

- [Anne] You mentioned growing up knowing that you were descended from the original whale rider. Are there whale stories that you heard about growing up?

- [Mere] There's all sorts of lovely, lovely stories about the whale, but the ones that resonate for me, because I'm particularly passionate about voyaging with our canoes, talk about particular kaitiaki, or guardian whales, that would accompany our canoes. The whales would travel by the hulls, so these are double-hulled voyaging canoes, and they would actually help to stabilize the canoe in choppy water. So no, those are the kinds of things that you hear about and of course there's many stories of whales saving different ancestors from drownings, of saving canoes. I guess, it's difficult for me because a lot of this knowledge is something that's earned. It's not knowledge I can just freely share. It's passed from family to family and is guarded quite...yeah.

- [Anne] Yeah.

- [Mere] Is guarded knowledge.

- [Anne] Have you been out in one of those voyaging canoes and encountered whales yourself?

- [Mere] Yeah, many times, many times. You know, that's all part of being able to talk to the whale. There's an energy transfer that happens there. And so they know that we're there as guardians trying to bring back this tradition and this relationship that existed for so long, but was disrupted through colonization. And even in this modern age, the whales still remember our voyaging canoes and they still remember us. And I think with my generation it's about taking things further and fulfilling our own responsibilities to give back to the tohora, to the whale, who has given us so much, you know, in the past, but also today. Because if our whale populations suffer any more than they currently have and we lose those populations, the whole ocean system will collapse. So that's what drives me, that's what I wake up for, that's why I torture myself with things like legislation. I'd much rather be out there on the ocean with the . But we have to make sacrifices, and I want to ensure that when this work is done, I can look back with pride and say, actually indigenous peoples led this effort and future generations will be the ones that will benefit from this work.

- [Anne] Thank you. Thank you so much.

- [Mere] You're welcome.

- [Anne] That was Mere Takoko, an indigenous ocean and climate conservationist. "To the Best of our Knowledge" comes to you from Madison, Wisconsin and Wisconsin Public Radio. Shannon Henry Kleiber produced this hour with help from Charles Monroe-Kane and Angelo Bautista. Our executive producer is Steve Paulson. Our technical director is Joe Hardtke, with help from Sarah Hopefl. Special thanks to Ocean Alliance and whale.org for some of the whale recordings we heard. And additional music was from Lobo Loco and Xylo-Ziko. For more about whales, you can also listen to Steve's 1995 interview with the late, great Roger Payne, remastered and now posted on our website at ttbook.org. And from all of us at "To the Best of our Knowledge", thanks for listening to us. Be well. PRX.