The summer sun had finally melted most of the surface ice on Prince William Sound, and a pod of hump-backed whales were gamboling in the open water. They were all singing, "By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea." But at any given moment, only a few had their heads above the surface, so it usually sounded like just a duet, or trio.[1] "You and me, you and me, oh how happy we'll be."
They were happy, too, "When each wave comes a-rolling in, we will duck or swim." Everything seemed to be going especially well. "And we'll float and fool around the water." No oil spills in quite a few years. "Over and under, and then up for air." A good migration, and a good breeding season. "Pa is rich, Ma is rich, so now what do we care?"
Just at the right moment, Dan and Gretchen surfaced together. "I love to be beside your side." They had been side-by-side for many years, and it was easy for them to sing that phrase with great gusto. They dove under water together, as others of the pod picked up the last stanza. "Beside the sea, beside the sea side, by the beautiful sea."
When Dan next surfaced, he found Mike, a younger generation humpback alongside him. "Hey, Dan, have you heard? We can communicate with each other."
"What do you think we're doing, right now?" Dan asked, the next time they surfaced.
"Well, you know it, and I know it." Mike submerged. "But now Humans are acknowledging it, too," he finished the thought on his next appearance.
"Oh, I know what you're talking about, Mike. It's that story of the Human scientists who think they talked to one of us. They recorded what they considered a whale 'greeting call' - poetically described by them as 'whups' and 'throps' - then, played it back, under water. As they reported in their paper on the incident, a humpback responded to the tape 'in a conversational manner.' They played the tapes over and over again, and they said that the humpback 'answered back' for twenty minutes. They admitted that they didn't have a clue what was being said, but they were sure they had taken 'the first step toward communication with non-Human intelligence.' They even suggested that whales might have 'intelligence much higher than originally thought.' I thought that was a nice concession on their part.
"Now, here's the rest of the story. The humpback they 'talked with' was Jake, our Number One class clown. He heard the recording. It was of whale sounds, all right, but just miscellaneous words - no context, so essentially just gibberish. Anyway, Jake thought he'd give them a thrill, so he hung around for almost a half-hour, just spouting random sounds back at them. He didn't think any more about it until we heard about their 'scientific paper' on the encounter. Quite an advancement in Human understanding of the world around them."
"So, the whole think was a joke - Jake playing tricks?"
"It was. You want to know something else about this great scientific breakthrough? Those Human researchers weren't really studying us - whales, I mean. They were part of a group who are trying to communicate with beings from other planets - space aliens. When they stumbled on some of the sounds that we make - well, just sounds to them, not language - they thought we might be communicating in some form of simple code. If they could 'break our code' - figure out its basic elements - they might be able to devise their own code that would be understandable to creatures from other planets."
Mike laughed. "I hope they haven't been spending too much time analyzing Jake's 'code'!"
Gretchen appeared beside them. "I heard some of what you were saying. In fairness to the Humans, Dan, we need to give them credit for some of their more sincere recent attempts. I'm sure they never figured out that the first 'conversation' with us was a hoax, but it did make them aware that whales are a lot more intelligent than they have always believed."
"You're thinking about those studies in the Caribbean of sperm whales?"
"I am. Jake's joke got the Humans thinking a little deeper. They're still not willing to acknowledge that whales - or any non-Humans - could have a real language, and could share thoughts and ideas and information. But they do know that something's going on they hadn't ever considered. Baby steps, I know, but it's a start."
"So, what was happening with the sperm whales?" Mike asked.
"As I said, the Alaska encounter got them thinking about the sounds they had heard the Caribbean whales make. Sperm whales have a 'click' sound that they build a lot of their language around. To Humans, it's just a sound - nothing to do with a Human-type language - but they did notice that the sperm whales were doing a lot of different things with their 'clicks.' One obvious pattern they observed was a series of five clicks the whales put together - 'cha-cha-chachacha,' kind of like the dance. The researchers began gathering recordings from around the world, and they eventually identified about 150 different 'click' patterns - what they label 'codas' - 21 different ones just in the Caribbean whales. Then, they noticed that the Caribbean whales were taking these 21 basic codas, and spinning them into hundreds of variant forms. The Humans have had to admit that there's something going on that's more sophisticated than they ever thought.
"They're still on the wrong track, because they can't admit to any real non-Human intelligence, but they have progressed beyond the idea that non-Humans can only react instinctively. However, now they're talking about using Artificial Intelligence to create a sperm whale alphabet. They just won't learn, will they?"
The three of them swam along in silence for a while, separated a little from the rest of the pod. "If we could talk to Humans, what would you like to say to them?" Mike finally asked.
Dan didn't take long to answer. "We definitely have a checkered history with that particular species. They hunted most of our families almost to extinction, with absolutely no regard for us, or for our future existence. Then, they turned around and gave us almost worldwide protection. Only a few nations - Japan, as an extreme example - chose to ignore the restrictions, and most whale species recovered pretty nicely. We can thank them for that. However, now we can't eat anything in the ocean, without taking in a whole load of ground up plastic. I don't know if it's killed any of us yet, but it sure isn't doing us any good. Of course, the big thing is Climate Change, with the warming of some of the oceans, and the cooling and dilution of others as glaciers continue to melt at alarming rates. It's greatly affecting our food supply, messing up our migration routes, and changing the timing of our reproductive activities. These changes are all the result of Human activity, with Humans refusing to take it all as seriously as it is."
"Which is crazy," Gretchen interjected, "Considering that it's going to kill them, too, not just us."
"To change the subject a little bit," said Mike, "What do you think of the Makah being given permission to kill gray whales, again?"
"That's a tough one, philosophically," Dan responded. "Of course, I have no business speaking for the gray whales. We're not going to be hunted, just them. Obviously, if I was a gray whale, I wouldn't want to be a target, no matter who was trying to kill me. If I had any kind of a death wish, I guess I'd rather be killed by the Makah - who will treat the whole situation reverently, and make good use of all my body parts - than I would by commercial whalers from Japan. But a dead whale is a dead whale, I don't practice the Makah religion, and I'd rather not die, at all.
"Speaking strictly from the Human standpoint, the Makah are the only Humans that included the right to whale in their treaty with the White invaders. Since it appears that the White Humans have always treated the Makah and related people pretty much like they treat us non-Humans, and have violated every treaty they ever made, it's some kind of a moral victory for that part of the original treaty to be honored, at last. However, I suspect no whale was a party to the original treaty, in which the Makah asserted a right to kill individuals of another species. So, where's the morality in that?
"You know, we've been talking as if Humans and non-Humans can't communicate. It's true that Humans can't speak any non-Human language. They won't learn because they've convinced themselves that only Humans are smart enough to have languages. However, every non-Human species in the world can understand - and speak! - at least one Human language, sometimes two or three. There is no location where a Human couldn't find another animal species to talk to - if they wanted to.
"By the way, those conversations do take place, almost always initiated by the non-Human. Most Humans don't hear about them, for several reasons. One, the Humans who do talk to other animals don't tell other Humans because they know they'll be treated the same as those people who claim to have seen flying saucers, or to have been abducted by little green men from other planets. Two, they may not believe the encounters really happened - that they had a strange dream, or hallucinations. Three, since the Dawn of Time, Humans have been telling themselves that nobody could be as clever as they are. They believe their fantasy so completely now, that no degree of 'proof' can ever change their minds. It's always going to be them against the rest of Nature."
"That's a sobering thought," Gretchen mused. "So, what do we do?"
"The same as we've always done, until we can't do it anymore."
[1] Whales can sing, or talk, only when their heads are out of the water. That leads to short phrases and long pauses to complete a sentence. This doesn't bother whales because that's natural for them. However, impatient humans would find a verbatim transcript of a whale conversation exasperatingly long, and writing it down a single conversation would require several pages of manuscript. I've written out a little bit of whale talk, just to show you how it looks, but from here on out, I'll condense it more to Human speed. It says pretty much the same thing. My rendition just lacks the beauty of pure Humpback.