In popular culture, an abundance of movies and literature explore humanity’s desire to communicate with non-human intelligence, whether existing here on Earth or in the form of civilizations from other galaxies.
Now, a team of scientists including researchers with the SETI Institute recently claimed to have established communication with a form of non-human aquatic intelligence. However, they aren’t talking about aliens from a water-based planet; they’re talking about whales in our oceans.
Last December, the Whale-SETI team announced they had studied humpback whale communication to aid in creating a tool in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
A female adult humpback whale named Twain in Southeast Alaska exhibited a positive response to an underwater speaker playing a recorded humpback ‘contact’ call into the sea. During the research, Twain circled the SETI team boat and responded with a ‘greeting signal’ in a conversational style for 20 minutes. Known as a ‘whup/throp’ the researchers assert that Twain responded to every playback call and accurately matched the interval variations between each signal.
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