LIFE ON A LITTLE- KNOWN PLANET
ALSO BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
Field Notes from a Catastrophe
The Sixth Extinction Under a White Sky H is for Hope
LIFE ON A LITTLE- KNOWN PLANET
DISPATCHES FROM A CHANGING WORLD
ELIZABETH KOLBERT
THE BODLEY HEAD
NDON
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All of the essays in this work were originally published in The New Yorker except for “The Guru of Doo-Doo: Profile of Sam Wasser, Who Uses DNA to Fight Elephant Poaching,” which was originally published as “The Elephant Detective” in the January–February 2017 issue of Smithsonian Magazine.
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Can Artificial Intelligence Allow Us to Speak to Other Species?
KILLING MRS. TIGGY- WINKLE
Drought Is Shrinking Lake Powell, Revealing a Hidden
Should the Natural World Have Rights?
Could Tinkering with Photosynthesis Prevent a Global Food
THE CATASTROPHIST Profile of James Hansen, the “Father of Global Warming”
THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD
Profile of Christiana Figueres, One of the Architects of the Paris Agreement
THE GURU OF DOO- DOO
Profile of Sam Wasser, Who Uses DNA to Fight Elephant Poaching
Race to Save Eyak, a Dying Language
LIFE ON A LITTLE- KNOWN PLANET
INTRODUCTION
AFEW MONTHS BEFORE the world shut down for COVID, I flew from the city of Adelaide, on Australia’s southern coast, to the town of Roxby Downs, in the country’s dusty interior. Nearly everyone who lives in Roxby Downs, or even just visits it, is connected to a copper and uranium mine north of town. I had come not for the metals, though, but for the marsupials. That night, I slept in a trailer in the outback. I had the place to myself except for a quoll that was occupying the living room. Quolls are cute but ferocious creatures that look a bit like spotted ferrets. They’re nocturnal, so all night long my neighbor paced her pen. Several times when I heard her scrabbling around, I got out of bed and went to check on her. I felt sad for her yet also exhilarated. Quolls are so rare these days that most Australians will see them only in zoos. Here I was, just passing through and practically sharing a flat with one.
The following day, the quoll was released by an ecologist named Katherine Moseby. For the past three decades, Moseby has been trying to protect Australia’s marsupials by putting up fences. The resulting exclosures, as the fenced-in spaces are known, might be thought of as zoos turned inside out: while zoos keep rare animals in, exclosures keep common animals out. Moseby’s fences are specially designed to exclude cats, which were introduced to Australia in the early nineteenth century and now roam the countryside by the millions. Predation by feral cats is one of the main reasons Australia’s fauna is in so
much trouble: of the country’s two hundred and seventy endemic species of land mammals, more than thirty are now extinct. Another fifty, including eastern quolls and northern quolls, are endangered.
By the time I got to Roxby Downs, Moseby had managed to fence in—or really, I suppose, out—an area of almost fifty square miles. Additional fencing divided this area into six “paddocks,” some of which could be used for conservation and some for experimentation. One experiment—the one that had drawn me to the outback—involved greater bilbies, rabbit-size marsupials with shrew-like noses and ratlike tails. Moseby thought that by exposing them to just a few cats at a time, it might be possible to nudge evolution along and, over generations, produce a line of bilbies with an innate fear of felines.
“We’re not going to ever get rid of every cat in the whole of Australia,” she observed at one point. At another, she said: “People say to me, ‘Oh, this could take a hundred years.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, it could take a hundred years. What else are you doing?’ ”
WE LIVE IN an extraordinary time. This is true not just from a parochial American (or Australian) perspective but from a planetary one. A recent study suggests that all living things—you, me, the birds and the bees, the snake in the grass, the worm in the apple as well as the tree the apple didn’t fall far from—are descended from a single-celled organism that evolved around four billion years ago. Since the days of LUCA—short for the Last Universal Common Ancestor—a great deal has happened. The atmosphere has been suffused with oxygen. The continents have crashed together and drifted apart. The entire planet has frozen over and thawed out. Plants and animals have crept out of the water and onto land. The age of reptiles has given way to the age of mammals.
But over the last four billion years, only very rarely has change rushed along at the pace it is moving today. And probably never before have so many different forms of change been operative. Owing to the actions of one species, which is, of course, our own, the world is now heating up at the same time that the oceans are acidifying, forests are
shrinking, groundwater is disappearing, microplastics are proliferating, and so-called forever chemicals are spreading. Every day, people are transporting thousands of species around the world, mostly in cargo. Those that find their new homes congenial—think cats in Australia—will often go on to wreak havoc. Many geologists believe that humans have become so much the dominant force on the planet that we have entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene.
Meanwhile, even as we are upending the natural world, we are coming to understand it in ever more intimate detail. In the Anthropocene, scientists can tease DNA from the bones of animals, such as mammoths, that vanished thousands, or even tens of thousands, of years ago. They can track bird migrations and butterfly movements by means of tiny transponders. They can piece together the history of the climate from shells found at the bottom of the sea and the history of the seas from the magnetic orientation of the oceanic crust.
E. O. Wilson once described the “human trajectory”—increasingly destructive in its impacts, increasingly sophisticated in its insights—as the “ultimate irony of organic evolution.” It is this irony that animates this book. Almost all of the stories collected here originally appeared in The New Yorker, where I’ve been fortunate enough to work for the last twenty-five years. These have been bad years for much of life on earth and all-absorbing ones for people who write about life on earth. Reporting on the “human trajectory” has taken me to the Greenland ice sheet, the Peruvian Andes, and the South Island of New Zealand, among many other spectacular places. In the course of my reporting, I have watched entirely new species be discovered and have visited with the last living members of species that once were widespread. I have also met scores of brilliant and dedicated people who are working to get the world on a better trajectory; these include researchers like Moseby, as well as activists, amateur naturalists, and ordinary citizens. Many appear in the pages that follow. Many others have informed my thinking but remain unnamed. One of the great privileges of being a journalist is it gives you the license to phone pretty much anyone, pretty much anywhere. I am very grateful to all those who answered my calls.
FINALLY, A WORD about words. In the grand scheme of things, words are latecomers. If you imagine the history of the planet compressed into a single day that began at twelve a.m., then LUCA showed up surprisingly early on, at about two in the morning. The first fish didn’t swim onto the scene until nighttime, and the first mammals didn’t appear until almost eleven p.m. No one knows whether early humans like Homo erectus could talk, but if so, language originated about half a minute ago. If not, then words have, figuratively speaking, been around for only about ten seconds. Written words have been around for maybe a tenth of a second.
Trying to capture in words a world that for billions of years did just fine without them is, admittedly, a tricky enterprise. “You cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets,” Edward Abbey observed in a book about the desert. The same holds true for a Caribbean bay or an Alpine glacier or a patch of scrubland in West Texas. Humans perceive only a sliver of the globe’s (nearly) infinite variety, and only a sliver of that sliver can be condensed into sentences. At the same time, narrative is what people use to make sense of things. It is how we convey to each other what we think is funny or important or urgent or tragic. Since the natural world cannot tell its own stories, it falls to us to step in. The essays and articles that follow represent my effort to do so.
PART ONE CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
TALK TO ME
Can Artificial Intelligence Allow Us to Speak to Other Species?
DAVID GRUBER BEGAN his almost impossibly varied career studying bluestriped grunt fish off the coast of Belize. He was an undergraduate, and his job was to track the fish at night. He navigated by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was performing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”
Gruber went on to work in Guyana, mapping forest plots, and in Florida, calculating how much water it would take to restore the Everglades. He wrote a PhD thesis on carbon cycling in the oceans and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he got interested in green fluorescent proteins, which are naturally synthesized by jellyfish but, with a little gene editing, can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans. While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. (Sharks see only in blue and green; fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish
experience the world. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy.
“I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me.
In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals.
The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. To find their prey—generally squid—in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation.
One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. Goldwasser, a Turing Award–winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges.
“It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. “But David really got into it.”
Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of AI at Oxford.
“This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about,” Bronstein told me. “But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. I thought that it would be nice to try.”
Gruber kept pushing the idea. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboti-
cist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative—Project CETI for short. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species.
“I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” Rus told me. “I mean, can we talk to whales?”
SPERM
WHALES ARE NOMADS. It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.
CETI has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island’s capital. The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves—cetacean bugs, as it were. The data thus collected can then be used to “train” machine-learning algorithms.
In July, I went down to Dominica to watch the CETI team go sperm whale bugging. My first morning on the island, I met up with Gruber just outside Roseau, on a dive-shop dock. Gruber, who is fifty, is a slight man with dark curly hair and a cheerfully anxious manner. He was carrying a waterproof case and wearing a CETI T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team showed up, also carrying waterproof cases and wearing CETI T-shirts. We climbed aboard an oversize Zodiac called CETI 2 and set off.
The night before, a tropical storm had raked the region with gusty winds and heavy rain, and Dominica’s volcanic peaks were still wreathed
in clouds. The sea was a series of white-fringed swells. CETI 2 sped along, thumping up and down, up and down. Occasionally, flying fish zipped by; these remained aloft for such a long time that I was convinced for a while they were birds.
About two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. A graduate student named Yaly Mevorach put on a set of headphones and lowered an underwater mike—a hydrophone—into the waves. She listened for a bit and then, smiling, handed the headphones to me.
The most famous whale calls are the long, melancholy “songs” issued by humpbacks. Sperm whale codas are neither mournful nor musical. Some people compare them to the sound of bacon frying, others to popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened through the headphones, I thought of horses clomping over cobbled streets. Then I changed my mind. The clatter was more mechanical, as if somewhere deep beneath the waves someone was pecking out a memo on a manual typewriter.
Mevorach unplugged the headphones from the mike, then plugged them into a contraption that looked like a car speaker riding a broom handle. The contraption, which I later learned had been jury-rigged out of, among other elements, a metal salad bowl, was designed to locate clicking whales. After twisting it around in the water for a while, Mevorach decided that the clicks were coming from the southwest. We thumped in that direction, and soon George called out, “Blow!”
A few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When whales are resting at the surface, only a fraction of their enormous bulk is visible.) The whale blew again, and a geyser-like spray erupted from the ridge’s left side.
As we were closing in, the whale blew yet again; then it raised its elegantly curved flukes into the air and dove. It was unlikely to resurface, I was told, for nearly an hour.
We thumped off in search of its kin. The farther south we traveled, the higher the swells. At one point, I felt my stomach lurch and went to the side of the boat to heave. “I like to just throw up and get back to work,” Mevorach told me.
TRYING TO ATTACH a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing on a Jet Ski. The exercise entails using a thirty-foot pole to stick the device onto the animal’s back, which in turn entails getting within thirty feet of a creature the size of a school bus. That day, several more whales were spotted. But, for all of our thumping around, CETI 2 never got close enough to one to unhitch the tagging pole.
The next day, the sea was calmer. Once again, we spotted whales, and several times the boat’s designated pole handler, Odel Harve, attempted to tag one. All his efforts went for naught. Either the whale dove at the last minute or the recording device slipped off the whale’s back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device, which was about a foot long and shaped like a surfboard, was supposed to adhere via suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood on CETI 2 lifted; with each new failure, it sank.
On my third day in Dominica, I joined a slightly different subset of the team on a different boat to try out a new approach. Instead of a long pole, this boat—a forty-foot catamaran called CETI 1—was carrying an experimental drone. The drone had been specially designed at Harvard and was fitted out with a video camera and a plastic claw. Because sperm whales are always on the move, there’s no guarantee of finding any; weeks can go by without a single sighting off Dominica. Once again, though, we got lucky, and a whale was soon spotted. Stefano Pagani, an undergraduate who had been brought along for his piloting skills, pulled on what looked like a VR headset, which was linked to the drone’s video camera. In this way, he could look down at the whale from the drone’s perspective and, it was hoped, plant a recording device, which had been loaded into the claw, on the whale’s back.
The drone took off and zipped toward the whale. It hovered for a few seconds, then dropped vertiginously. For the suction cups to adhere, the drone had to strike the whale at just the right angle, with just the right amount of force. Post impact, Pagani piloted the craft back to the boat with trembling hands. “The nerves get to you,” he said.
“No pressure,” Gruber joked. “It’s not like there’s a New Yorker reporter watching or anything.” Someone asked for a round of applause. A cheer went up from the boat. The whale, for its part, seemed oblivious. It lolled around with the recording device, which was painted bright orange, stuck to its dark-gray skin. Then it dove.
Sperm whales are among the world’s deepest divers. They routinely descend two thousand feet and sometimes more than a mile. (The deepest a human has ever gone with scuba gear is just shy of eleven hundred feet.) If the device stayed on, it would record any sounds the whale made on its travels. It would also log the whale’s route, its heartbeat, and its orientation in the water. The suction was supposed to last around eight hours; after that—assuming all went according to plan— the device would come loose, bob to the surface, and transmit a radio signal that would allow it to be retrieved.
I said it was too bad we couldn’t yet understand what the whales were saying, because perhaps this one, before she dove, had clicked out where she was headed.
“Come back in two years,” Gruber said.
EVERY SPERM WHALE’S tail is unique. On some, the flukes are divided by a deep notch. On others, they meet almost in a straight line. Some flukes end in points; some are more rounded. Many are missing distinctive chunks, owing, presumably, to orca attacks. To ID a whale in the field, researchers usually rely on a photographic database called Flukebook. One of the very few scientists who can do it simply by sight is CETI’s lead field biologist, Shane Gero.
Gero, who is forty-three, is tall and broad, with an eager smile and a pronounced Canadian accent. A scientist-in-residence at Ottawa’s Carleton University, he has been studying the whales off Dominica since 2005. By now, he knows them so well that he can relate their triumphs and travails, as well as who gave birth to whom and when. A decade ago, as Gero started having children of his own, he began referring to his “human family” and his “whale family.” (His human family lives in Ontario.) Another marine biologist once described
Gero as sounding “like Captain Ahab after twenty years of psychotherapy.”
When Gruber approached Gero about joining Project CETI, he was, initially, suspicious. “I get a lot of emails like ‘Hey, I think whales have crystals in their heads’ and ‘Maybe we can use them to cure malaria,’ ” Gero told me. “The first email David sent me was, like, ‘Hi, I think we could find some funding to translate whale.’ And I was, like, ‘Oh, boy.’ ”
A few months later, the two men met in person, in Washington, D.C., and hit it off. Two years after that, Gruber did find some funding. CETI received thirty-three million dollars from the Audacious Project, a philanthropic collaborative whose backers include Richard Branson and Ray Dalio. (The grant, which was divided into five annual payments, will run out in 2025.)
The whole time I was in Dominica, Gero was there as well, supervising graduate students and helping with the tagging effort. From him, I learned that the first whale I had seen was named Rita and that the whales that had subsequently been spotted included Raucous, Roger, and Rita’s daughter, Rema. All belonged to a group called Unit R, which Gero characterized as “tightly and actively social.” Apparently, Unit R is also warmhearted. Several years ago, when a group called Unit S got whittled down to just two members—Sally and TBB—the Rs adopted them.
Sperm whales have the biggest brains on the planet—six times the size of humans’. Their social lives are rich, complicated, and, some would say, ideal. The adult members of a unit, which may consist of anywhere from a few to a few dozen individuals, are all female. Male offspring are permitted to travel with the group until they’re around fifteen years old; then, as Gero put it, they are “socially ostracized.” Some continue to hang around their mothers and sisters, clicking away for months unanswered. Eventually, though, they get the message. Fully grown males are solitary creatures. They approach a band of females—presumably not their immediate relatives—only in order to mate. To signal their arrival, they issue deep, booming sounds known as clangs. No one knows exactly what makes a courting sperm whale
attractive to a potential mate; Gero told me that he had seen some clanging males greeted with great commotion and others with the cetacean equivalent of a shrug.
Female sperm whales, meanwhile, are exceptionally close. The adults in a unit not only travel and hunt together; they also appear to confer on major decisions. If there’s a new mother in the group, the other members mind the calf while she dives for food. In some units, though not in Unit R, sperm whales even suckle one another’s young. When a family is threatened, the adults cluster together to protect their offspring, and when things are calm the calves fool around.
“It’s like my kids and their cousins,” Gero said.
The day after I watched the successful drone flight, I went out with Gero to try to recover the recording device. More than twenty-four hours had passed, and it still hadn’t been located. Gero decided to drive out along a peninsula called Scotts Head, at the southwestern tip of Dominica, where he thought he might be able to pick up the radio signal. As we wound around on the island’s treacherously narrow roads, he described to me an idea he had for a children’s book that, read in one direction, would recount a story about a human family that lives on a boat and looks down at the water and, read from the other direction, would be about a whale family that lives deep beneath the boat and looks up at the waves.
“For me, the most rewarding part about spending a lot of time in the culture of whales is finding these fundamental similarities, these fundamental patterns,” he said. “And, you know, sure, they won’t have a word for ‘tree.’ And there’s some part of the sperm whale experience that our primate brain just won’t understand. But those things that we share must be fundamentally important to why we’re here.”
After a while, we reached, quite literally, the end of the road. Beyond that was a hill that had to be climbed on foot. Gero was carrying a portable antenna, which he unfolded when we got to the top. If the recording unit had surfaced anywhere within twenty miles, Gero calculated, we should be able to detect the signal. It occurred to me that we were now trying to listen for a listening device. Gero held the antenna aloft and put his ear to some kind of receiver. He didn’t hear
anything, so, after admiring the view for a bit, we headed back down. Gero was hopeful that the device would eventually be recovered. But, as far as I know, it is still out there somewhere, adrift in the Caribbean.
THE FIRST SCIENTIFIC, or semi-scientific, study of sperm whales was a pamphlet published in 1835 by a Scottish ship doctor named Thomas Beale. Called The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, it proved so popular that Beale expanded the pamphlet into a book, which was issued under the same title four years later.
At the time, sperm whale hunting was a major industry, both in Britain and in the United States. The animals were particularly prized for their spermaceti, the waxy oil that fills their gigantic heads. Spermaceti is an excellent lubricant, and, burned in a lamp, produces a clean, bright light; in Beale’s day, it could sell for five times as much as ordinary whale oil. (It is the resemblance between semen and spermaceti that accounts for the species’ embarrassing name.)
Beale believed sperm whales to be silent. “It is well known among the most experienced whalers that they never produce any nasal or vocal sounds whatever, except a trifling hissing at the time of the expiration of the spout,” he wrote. The whales, he said, were also gentle— “a most timid and inoffensive animal.” Herman Melville relied heavily on Beale in composing Moby-Dick. (His personal copy of The Natural History of the Sperm Whale is now housed in Harvard’s Houghton Library.) He attributed to sperm whales a “pyramidical silence.”
“The whale has no voice,” Melville wrote. “But then again,” he went on, “what has the whale to say? Seldom have I known any profound being that had anything to say to this world, unless forced to stammer out something by way of getting a living.”
The silence of the sperm whales went unchallenged until 1957. That year, two researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution picked up sounds from a group they’d encountered off the coast of North Carolina. They detected strings of “sharp clicks,” and speculated that these were made for the purpose of echolocation. Twenty years elapsed before one of the researchers, along with a different colleague
from Woods Hole, determined that some sperm whale clicks were issued in distinctive, often repeated patterns, which the pair dubbed “codas.” Codas seemed to be exchanged between whales and so, they reasoned, must serve some communicative function.
Since then, cetologists have spent thousands of hours listening to codas, trying to figure out what that function might be. Gero, who wrote his PhD thesis on vocal communication between sperm whales, told me that one of the “universal truths” about codas is their timing. There are always four seconds between the start of one coda and the beginning of the next. Roughly two of those seconds are given over to clicks; the rest is silence. Only after the pause, which may or may not be analogous to the pause a human speaker would put between words, does the clicking resume. Codas are clearly learned or, to use the term of art, socially transmitted. Whales in the eastern Pacific exchange one set of codas, those in the eastern Caribbean another, and those in the South Atlantic yet another. Baby sperm whales pick up the codas exchanged by their relatives, and before they can click them out proficiently they “babble.”
The whales around Dominica have a repertoire of around twentyfive codas. These codas differ from one another in the number of their clicks and also in their rhythms. The coda known as three regular, or 3R, for example, consists of three clicks issued at equal intervals. The coda 7R consists of seven evenly spaced clicks. In seven increasing, or 7I, by contrast, the interval between the clicks grows longer; it’s about five-hundredths of a second between the first two clicks, and between the last two it’s twice that long.
In four decreasing, or 4D, there’s a fifth of a second between the first two clicks and only a tenth of a second between the last two. Then there are syncopated codas. The coda most frequently issued by members of Unit R, which has been dubbed 1+1+3, has a cha-cha-esque rhythm and might be rendered in English as click . . . click . . . click-click-click.
If codas are in any way comparable to words, a repertoire of twentyfive represents a pretty limited vocabulary. But, just as no one can yet say what, if anything, codas mean to sperm whales, no one can say exactly what features are significant to them. It may be that there are nuances
in, say, pacing or pitch that have so far escaped human detection. Already, CETI team members have identified a new kind of signal—a single click—that may serve as some kind of punctuation mark.
When whales are resting near the surface, their exchanges can last an hour or more. Even by human standards, sperm whale chatter is insistent and repetitive. “They’re talking on top of each other all the time,” Gero told me.
A snatch of dialogue recorded between two members of Unit R runs as follows. (Both Roger and Rita are adult females.)
Roger: 1+1+3
Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3
Roger: 9I
Rita: 1+1+3
Roger: 10I
Rita: 1+1+3, 1+1+3
Roger: 11I
Rita: 1+1+3
Roger: 10I, 11I, 1+1+3
Rita: 1+1+3
The “conversation” continues along much these same lines, until Rita finally changes her tune:
Rita: 1+1+3
Roger: 12R, 10I, 10I, 9I, 9I
Rita: 9I, 8I
NOT LONG AGO, suffering from writer’s block, I asked ChatGPT if it could rewrite Moby-Dick from the whale’s perspective. The chatbot began modestly. “As an AI language model, I can certainly attempt to rewrite a small excerpt,” it told me. Then it launched into what it titled Moby-Dick—The White Leviathan’s Tale. In Melville’s Moby-Dick, the plot turned on an unfortunate case of
mistaken identity. Some other whale had gnawed off Ahab’s leg; the white whale was as innocent as the driven snow.
“My heart was one of peace, my spirit one with the rhythm of the currents,” ChatGPT wrote.
I knew not of the vendetta forming against me, for I was but a creature of instinct, a guardian of the seas. But Captain Ahab’s thirst for vengeance loomed large, and I became the object of his undying rage. The scar he bore from a previous encounter with my kind had branded me as his ultimate adversary. In his eyes, I represented a force of nature that defied his understanding, a living enigma of the ocean’s might.
In paragraph seven, I was surprised—and excited—to see the whale/ bot allude to the problem of interspecies communication:
Deep within the abyss of the sea, I pondered the futility of the captain’s quest. I longed to communicate with him, to show him that my kind, too, had emotions and families to protect. But the language barrier between our worlds remained an insurmountable chasm.
As anyone who has been conscious for the past ten months knows, ChatGPT is capable of amazing feats. It can write essays, compose sonnets, explain scientific concepts, and produce jokes (though these last are not necessarily funny). If you ask ChatGPT how it was created, it will tell you that first it was trained on a “massive corpus” of data from the internet. This phase consisted of what’s called “unsupervised machine learning,” which was performed by an intricate array of processing nodes known as a neural network. Basically, the “learning” involved filling in the blanks; according to ChatGPT, the exercise entailed “predicting the next word in a sentence given the context of the previous words.” By digesting millions of web pages—and calculating and recalculating the odds—ChatGPT got so good at this guessing game that, without ever understanding English, it mastered the language. (Other languages it is “fluent” in include Chinese, Spanish, and French.)
In theory at least, what goes for English (and Chinese and Spanish and French) also goes for sperm whale. Provided that a computer model can be trained on enough data, it should be able to master coda prediction. It could then—once again in theory—generate sequences of codas that a sperm whale would find convincing. The model wouldn’t understand sperm whale–ese, but it could, in a manner of speaking, speak it. Call it ClickGPT.
Currently, the largest collection of sperm whale codas is an archive assembled by Gero in his years on and off Dominica. The codas contain roughly a hundred thousand clicks. In a paper published last year, members of the CETI team estimated that, to fulfill its goals, the project would need to assemble some four billion clicks—which is to say, a collection roughly forty thousand times larger than Gero’s.
“One of the key challenges toward the analysis of sperm whale (and more broadly, animal) communication using modern deep learning techniques is the need for sizable datasets,” the team wrote.
In addition to bugging individual whales, CETI is planning to tether a series of three “listening stations” to the floor of the Caribbean Sea. The stations should be able to capture the codas of whales chatting up to twelve miles from shore. (Though inaudible above the waves, sperm whale clicks can register up to two hundred and thirty decibels, which is louder than a gunshot or a rock concert.) The information gathered by the stations will be less detailed than what the tags can provide, but it should be much more plentiful.
One afternoon, I drove with Gruber and CETI’s station manager, Yaniv Aluma, a former Israeli Navy SEAL, to the port in Roseau, where pieces of the listening stations were being stored. The pieces were shaped like giant sink plugs and painted bright yellow. Gruber explained that the yellow plugs were buoys, and that the listening equipment— essentially, large collections of hydrophones—would dangle from the bottom of the buoys, on cables. The cables would be weighed down with old train wheels, which would anchor them to the seabed. A stack of wheels, rusted orange, stood nearby. Gruber suddenly turned to Aluma and, pointing to the pile, said, “You know, we’re going to need more of these.” Aluma nodded glumly.
The listening stations have been the source of nearly a year’s worth of delays for CETI. The first was installed last summer, in water six thousand feet deep. Fish were attracted to the buoy, so the spot soon became popular among fishermen. After about a month, the fishermen noticed that the buoy was gone. Members of CETI’s Dominicabased staff set out in the middle of the night on CETI 1 to try to retrieve it. By the time they reached the buoy, it had drifted almost thirty miles offshore. Meanwhile, the hydrophone array, attached to the rusty train wheels, had dropped to the bottom of the sea.
The trouble was soon traced to the cable, which had been manufactured in Texas by a company that specializes in offshore oil-rig equipment. “They deal with infrastructure that’s very solid,” Aluma explained. “But a buoy has its own life. And they didn’t calculate so well the torque or load on different motions—twisting and moving sideways.” The company spent months figuring out why the cable had failed and finally thought it had solved the problem. In June, Aluma flew to Houston to watch a new cable go through stress tests. In the middle of the tests, the new design failed. To avoid further delays, the CETI team reconfigured the stations. One of the reconfigured units was installed late last month. If it doesn’t float off, or in some other way malfunction, the plan is to get the two others in the water sometime this fall.
A SPERM WHALE’S head takes up nearly a third of its body; its narrow lower jaw seems borrowed from a different animal entirely; and its flippers are so small as to be almost dainty. (The formal name for the species is Physeter macrocephalus, which translates roughly as “bigheaded blowhole.”) “From just about any angle,” Hal Whitehead, one of the world’s leading sperm whale experts (and Gero’s thesis adviser), has written, sperm whales appear “very strange.” I wanted to see more of these strange-looking creatures than was visible from a catamaran, and so, on my last day in Dominica, I considered going on a commercial tour that offered customers a chance to swim with whales, assuming that any could be located. In the end—partly because I sensed that Gruber disapproved of the practice—I dropped the idea.
Instead, I joined the crew on CETI 1 for what was supposed to be another round of drone tagging. After we’d been underway for about two hours, codas were picked up, to the northeast. We headed in that direction and soon came upon an extraordinary sight. There were at least ten whales right off the boat’s starboard. They were all facing the same direction, and they were bunched tightly together, in rows. Gero identified them as members of Unit A. The members of Unit A were originally named for characters in Margaret Atwood novels, and they include Lady Oracle, Aurora, and Rounder, Lady Oracle’s daughter.
Earlier that day, the crew on CETI 2 had spotted pilot whales, or blackfish, which are known to harass sperm whales. “This looks very defensive,” Gero said, referring to the formation. Suddenly, someone yelled out, “Red!” A burst of scarlet spread through the water, like a great banner unfurling. No one knew what was going on. Had the pilot whales stealthily attacked? Was one of the whales in the group injured? The crowding increased until the whales were practically on top of one another.
Then a new head appeared among them. “Holy fucking shit!” Gruber exclaimed.
“Oh, my God!” Gero cried. He ran to the front of the boat, clutching his hair in amazement. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” The head belonged to a newborn calf, which was about twelve feet long and weighed maybe a ton. In all his years of studying sperm whales, Gero had never watched one being born. He wasn’t sure anyone ever had.
As one, the whales made a turn toward the catamaran. They were so close I got a view of their huge, eerily faceless heads and pink lower jaws. They seemed oblivious of the boat, which was now in their way. One knocked into the hull, and the foredeck shuddered.
The adults kept pushing the calf around. Its mother and her relatives pressed in so close that the baby was almost lifted out of the water. Gero began to wonder whether something had gone wrong. By now, everyone, including the captain, had gathered on the bow. Pagani and another undergraduate, Aidan Kenny, had launched two drones and were filming the action from the air. Mevorach, meanwhile, was recording the whales through a hydrophone.