You might’ve heard we’re trying to talk to whales . It sounds crazy, but it’s not so far-fetched, as in recent years we’ve been getting closer and closer to cracking the code of their remarkably complex communications . The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Now, a groundbreaking discovery has been made through eavesdropping on the conversations of sperm whales ( Physeter macrocephalus ). It turns out they use single and double vowel sounds in their vocalizations, sort of like how we might say “did” or “died”. Combining vowels like that is called a diphthong, and the existence of a comparative feature in whale communications has the potential to upend what we thought we knew about non-human intelligence.

"This discovery

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