By 
December 12th, 2023
NOAA image of humpback whale encounter.
Image credit: NOAA
You could say it’s a “whale of an idea” – but that sound’s corn-fried fishy as an opening line for a search for extraterrestrial intelligence story.
But a team of scientists from the SETI Institute, University of California Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation, had a close encounter with a non-human intelligence of the aquatic kind.
A Whale-SETI team has been studying humpback whale communication systems and a new paper on the work has been published, led by Brenda McCowan of U.C. Davis, a professor in the university’s school of veterinary medicine and a core scientist in neuroscience and behavior.
Intelligence filters
The Whale-SETI research is being done in an effort to develop “intelligence filters” for other star folk out there in the cosmological ether.
Image credit: Brenda McCowan, et al.
According to the recently published research, in response to a recorded humpback “contact” call played into the sea via an underwater speaker, a humpback whale given the name Twain approached and circled the team’s boat, while responding in a conversational style to the whale “greeting signal.”
Playback call
According to a SETI Institute statement, “during the 20-minute exchange, Twain responded to each playback call and matched the interval variations between each signal.”
The Whale-SETI team is studying intelligent, terrestrial, non-human communication systems to develop filters to apply to any extraterrestrial signals received.
Image credit: Jodi Frediani
Important assumption
“Because of current limitations on technology, an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers,” said Laurance Doyle of the SETI Institute, a coauthor on the paper.
“This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales,” Doyle said.
Other members of the Whale-SETI group and coauthors of the paper are Josie Hubbard, Lisa Walker, and Jodi Frediani, with specialties in animal intelligences, humpback whale song analysis, and photography and behavior of humpback whales, respectively.
To access the paper in a recent issue of the journal Peer J. entitled: “Interactive Bioacoustic Playback as a Tool for Detecting and Exploring Nonhuman Intelligence: ‘Conversing’ with an Alaskan Humpback Whale,” go to:
https://peerj.com/articles/16349/
Image credit: UCLA SETI
Posted in Space News
