Researchers from an organization that seeks out extraterrestrial life camped out at a remote lighthouse in Southeast Alaska for the better part of the summer, but they weren’t out there looking for little green men.
They were there to look for — and listen to — the humpback whales that swarm the waters of Frederick Sound.
On a July voyage to Five Finger Lighthouse, skipper Josef Quitslund noticed something moving in the distance. He slowed down and cut the engine, then tossed a contraption that looks something like a baby monitor into the water.
The device — something called a hydrophone — picks up humpback whale sounds. Almost out of nowhere, several adult humpbacks rushed to the surface, mouths agape, scooping up a school of herring.
They were bubble-net feeding, a kind of cooperative hunting strategy where groups of whales get together to blow complex configurations of bubbles that allow them to trap their prey.
Quitslund’s wife, biologist Stephanie Hayes, pointed out a calf hanging back — rolling back and forth in a patch of kelp.
“He’s playing with kelp!” Hayes said, gesturing at the calf. “He’s giving himself a kelp bath!”
The whales finished their breakfast and the whale researchers continued on to the lighthouse, where premier whale behavioral scientist Fred Sharpe was helping coordinate Whale-SETI, a 15-year project spearheaded by the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute.
“Frederick Sound is this incredible solar-powered krill factory,” said Sharpe. “It brings whales — in some years, by the hundreds. And we’re a couple mountain ranges back from the open ocean, so we’re shielded from the ship noises.”
The team needs that relative quiet so they can listen carefully to the whales in the surrounding waters.
Sharpe and his team have been trying to crack the code of humpback whale communication for many years now, and he thinks they’re getting close. He’s part of a research group that “talked” to a female humpback whale named Twain by playing whale noises back to her with an underwater speaker.
“We had an event where we described a 20 minute interaction with a whale right up by the lighthouse, where we exchanged 36 signals back and forth: one of these ‘throp’ calls. Throp call is one of their basic social sounds that the humpback whales give,” Sharpe said. “The social sounds are kind of like … sort of social chatter — a diverse set of social chatter, but shows some stability over time and space.”
Acoustic engineer Joe Olson was wearing an on-the-nose “Star Trek” sweatshirt.
He said encounters like the one with Twain might inch us closer to understanding extraterrestrial intelligence. But he said they can’t approach the experiment like they’re trying to learn a language on human terms.
“We only see what we’re looking for,” said Olson. “And so, with the communication of the humpbacks, we’re only going to figure out what it is that we’re looking for, right? It’s the same with aliens. For all we know, there’s aliens sending neutrino signals. But… we have no way to manipulate neutrinos. And they may have been beaming things out as saying: ‘Hey, look, look, look!’”
Another group of SETI researchers were scheduled to arrive at the lighthouse in just a couple of days, and Sharpe’s team had much to do to prepare.
They set up hydrophones on almost every corner of the island. But those devices weren’t just picking up whale noises, as Olson explained on a cliff where he had installed a hydrophone.
“We’re just hearing bivalves over here. Stuff that’s stuck to the walls … barnacles, mussels, whatever,” Olson said, before giving his best bivalve imitation.
Lighthouse keeper Don Merrill has watched this team of scientists scurry around his home with strange equipment for several days now. On the alien question: he’s got his doubts.
“Do you want it from a religious standpoint, or from a metaphysical standpoint?” asked Merrill. “When you’re bringing up aliens, I am quite a skeptic.”
But his face lit up when asked how he feels about the hydrophone speakers strewn across his house.
“That’s cool,” said Merrill. “I come out here sometimes and I’ll just turn the sound up, just because I want to know what’s going on. I grew up on the ocean, (as a) fishermen. I had no idea that was that much sound down there. That is a wild place! … It’s really opened my eyes.”
Inspiring that kind of excitement is part of what the group is aiming for with this project. Olson said by holding up the possibility of communicating with animals, they can get people to care about them.
“When we see something that we understand or we love or we connect with, we’re more likely to try to protect them or to respect them,” he said. “And who knows, maybe we’ll crack the code, right? If there’s a code to be cracked, maybe Fred will be the one to crack that code.”
They’re not quite there yet. But at the end of the summer research session, Sharpe said he’s happy with the diversity of noises and behaviors they added to their repertoire. He said he’s excited to continue attempting to translate humpback whale language to make us feel a little less alone on the planet — if not the universe.
