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The coastal sanctuary that the Whale Sanctuary Project is creating in Nova Scotia for whales who are being retired from entertainment parks will be an ideal location for the non-invasive study of cetacean (whale and dolphin) communication.
And since the vocalizations and communication among the residents of the sanctuary will be an important measure of their well-being, we invited five pioneers in animal communication studies to join us for a webinar to tell us about some of their remarkable discoveries and how their work might benefit the whales at the sanctuary.
Right now, there are basically two ways of studying communication among whales and dolphins: in the wild and in aquariums and entertainment parks. Studies of whale communication at entertainment parks have limited value because of the entirely unnatural conditions in which the whales are forced to live. And while studies conducted in the wild have enormous value, they are challenging because of the time and expense that’s involved in traveling with the whales and dolphins over an extended period of time.
An authentic coastal sanctuary, however, will be able to supplement the work that’s being done in the open ocean by monitoring and recording all the communication among the whales and pairing it with their other activities, movements and behaviors. Moreover, we will be able to see how communication and other behaviors change over time in the sanctuary environment.
Our guests were:
- Dr. Valeria Vergara, who has conducted groundbreaking studies of beluga whale communication both in captivity and in the wild and is well-known for her discovery of contact calls between beluga whales.
- Aza Raskin, co-founder and executive director of the Earth Species Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to decoding nonhuman communication and creating better interspecies understanding. He is also co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.
- Dr. Brenda McCowan, a biological anthropologist who uses information theory and other methodologies to assess the diversity, complexity, and development of communicative repertoires across a wide range of species.
- Dr. David Gruber, the founder and lead of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), an interdisciplinary project aimed at decoding sperm whale communication using artificial intelligence and non-invasive robotics.
- Dr. James Crutchfield, a physicist who studies complex systems and pattern discovery to learn how these can be applied to understanding nonhuman communication systems.
After presentations by each of the guests, the ensuing discussion quickly became a brain-storming session in which the group discussed the kinds of protocols, methodologies, and technical features of the sanctuary that could be used to study the whales. For example, observation towers and arrays of hydrophones synched with underwater cameras and drone footage could be key systems of data collection.
At the end of the webinar, it was clear that this webinar is just the beginning of what will be an ongoing dialog that will influence the design of the sanctuary and the ways it can contribute to our scientific understanding of who belugas and orcas are.