The immediate problem with orca communication is its apparent limitations, at least from our human perspective. The stereotyped calls with which they communicate are fairly complex by animal standards but have serious limitations, if judged on the basis of human communications, since they appear to have an extremely small vocabulary.
There is a constellation of about ten traits that define what human linguists mean by language, notably limitless expression, a discrete combinatorial system (using a system of symbols whose coagulation forms disparate meanings), recursion (the internal embedding of syntax), and a memory system, as well as the creation of new sounds, arbitrariness, and the ability to convey information based on perceiving in advance what the listener already knows (called “social cognitive aptitude”). As Justin Gregg has persuasively demonstrated, bottlenose dolphins score reasonably well on many of these counts (cumulatively, they score a 20, about the same as chimpanzees, on a scale in which humans form a baseline top score of 50), but score a zero on the definitive issue of limitless expression.
“When you look for the markers of what we call language,” says orca scientist John Ford, who studies their communications, “they simply are not present.”
If you want to know why no one has ever deciphered dolphin communications so that we can talk to them, and they to us, the answer is simple: The scientific community reached the conclusion some time back that these communications did not constitute language, and there has been very little evidence to emerge since to alter that conclusion. It was simply not considered a fruitful avenue of investigation.
However, whether this is the case for killer whales is an open question, since they have been studied very little in laboratory settings; most studies of orca calls have been in the wild, and most of them have focused on social aspects of the communications without delving into structure and meaning, since it is so difficult to observe their underwater behavior, especially in relation to their communications. If orcas are only slightly larger versions of bottlenose dolphins, as they are frequently viewed, then their communications are also of limited scientific interest. If, instead, they are to dolphins what humans are to chimpanzees, then it’s possible that science has so far overlooked this avenue.
It is important to note that, in addition to the differences in their physical brains (orca brains are not only four times larger but a good deal more complex than bottlenose brains) scientists have observed an important qualitative difference between dolphin and orca communications. Orcas communicate in a socially structured way. Whereas dolphins collectively seem to chatter willy nilly with little regard to one another, orcas both captive and wild are generally more polite. They tend to wait for each other to finish calling before making their own calls.
Orca call exchanges thus take on at least the surface appearance of conversations, even if only crude informational exchanges. Many of these exchanges feature idiosyncratic sounds, the meanings of which are utterly unknown. This has implications, moreover, for the linguistic possibilities of orca communications, since the existence of conversation also suggests the possibility of exchanging ideas.
That is hardly the end of the story. Orca calls are in fact very complex and acoustically rich, suggesting that information could be imbedded within them in ways that are imperceptible to human ears, just as the peculiar sounds of a computer modem, heard over a phone, sound like mere repetitive screeches but are, in fact, carrying signals rich with information. You just need the right processor to translate it all. Theoretically, this could be what is happening with orca calls, and we would need an orca’s complex brain to be able to process and translate it.
This remains, however, largely a matter of speculation. The truth is that, while dolphin communications have been studied extensively, work on killer-whale communication has been limited in scope and depth. If killer whales’ communications are not significantly more sophisticated than those of their cousins, the bottlenose dolphins, then the picture is ambiguous. Dolphins have shown a clear ability to learn a simple human language and to comprehend syntax, but their poor scores when tested for infinite expression make it seem unlikely that they use what we call a language.
Orca vocalizations typically are a fairly limited set of calls, usually comprised of a single rising and falling tone that is specific to each orca’s familial pod, with similar tones appearing in sequence, repeated between individuals in an apparent call-and-response behavior. These are accompanied by idiosyncratic whistles, grunts, and squawks. The meanings of each of these sounds is utterly unknown, since no one has ever been able to track wild orcas’ underwater behaviors in relation to the sounds they are making. Even among captive orcas, there has been nothing to indicate that these are in any way different than the calls emitted by birds and other mammals, other than that the sounds are specific to family and broader social groups rather than to entire species.
All told, the scientists who collect these sounds typically have found about forty different sounds that wild orcas will make in their social interactions with other orcas, and these sounds are usually specific to a single family group. This appears to be a fairly limited vocabulary, at least on first hearing. Any linguist hoping to catch glimpses of language therein may well be disappointed. Nonetheless, the distinctive social-group-oriented nature of the calls is deep enough that even scientists are comfortable referring to them as “dialects.”
A simple interpretation that is clear to the scientists who observe them regularly is that there is almost certainly a beacon-like quality to the calls; their frequency during travel and foraging suggests that these calls let the orcas all know the positions of their fellow pod members and perhaps enable them to coordinate hunting behaviors. Another purpose may be simply reinforcing pod identities, since the call repertoires remain stable over generations within these pods.
The most seasoned analyst of orca communications is Canadian whale scientist John Ford, the man whose research established definitively that not only do orcas use calls for communication, but that they have dialects that reflect their sophisticated social organizations. Ford has spent years analyzing orca calls and echolocation in the wild, and he remains, after all these years, a little baffled and awestruck—but realistic, too.
“In my opinion, the communication is a challenge for us,” says Ford. “There’s much more to learn about it. We don’t have all the answers. But I’ve yet to see any evidence of representational signals—the features of what we call language. I think it’s pretty much a here and now communication system.”
Typical of scientists, he qualifies these judgments by noting that linguistic features in orca communication may in fact exist, but there’s no data to support it yet, because “so much communication goes on with these whales under the surface where we can’t see what they’re actually doing, it’s hard to link the fine details of behavior to the calls.”
“In my opinion, the different repertoires of the calls that are used by these groups are most importantly kinship flags, or badges—they convey really sophisticated information on the genealogy of the individual and his group, and play an important role in keeping the group together, but also in keeping them from becoming inbred, by basically encouraging cross-breeding outside the dialect group,” Ford says.
Ford, too, has observed the echolocation-sharing qualities of social orca pods: “No doubt they do share echoes,” he says. “In fact, that’s another study that Lance Barrett-Lennard did, looking at echolocation differences between residents and transients, where he was able to plot the amount of echolocation activity against increasing group sizes in residents. It’s not a linear relationship at all.
“So the simplest explanation for that is that the proportion of echolocation activity decreases with increasing group size, so it would suggest that not everybody is swimming around clicking independently—they’re making use of each other’s clicks. Or they’re just following the animals that are doing the clicking.
“They certainly can get
information from their mother’s echolocation, as you experienced. Because the clicks are so directional, though, it’s only going to work when the animal eavesdropping is really close to the one clicking. I think there are a lot of social components to echolocation as well.”
There well may be more to orcas’ vocalizations than the simple communication we hear. Scientists who have analyzed the nature of the calls say that, as with the echolocation bullets, these are very dense and rich sounds. Even within the range of orcas who are repeating their stereotyped family calls, there are tremendous variations in tones, in intensity, and in volume. There are also variations in emotional content. It is not unusual, for example, to hear an adult seeming to chastise a young calf it is accompanying with a series of demanding-sounding chirps (though whether that is the actual intent is hard to say). Repeated stereotyped calls also vary widely in intensity, at times sounding more urgent and emphatic than the repeated beacon calls that populate many of their conversations. Considering that we are talking about animals whose sense of hearing is far more acute and wide-ranging than ours, and whose brains are clearly capable of processing extremely high levels of data from that sound, it is not unreasonable to suspect that there is much more to orca calls than meets the human ear.
Val Veirs, a retired Colorado College physicist who now monitors Southern Resident orca calls from his home on the western side of San Juan Island—as well as all the sound events in Haro Strait—with a sophisticated array of hydrophones and computers, has developed his own theories about what might be going on with killer-whale communications. He has paid especially close attention to the well-known stereotypical call of the J2 pod, known as S1.
“My feeling is that S1 is like a radio station for the J pod,” says Veirs. “When we dial up 91.5 here, we get the Port Angeles NPR station. And at 91.5, that’s like S1; the call is like a channel. It’s a channel that J pod has decided to use to communicate. Now, when you listen to 91.5, you’re not listening to 91.5 million cycles per second—that’s pretty irrelevant to us. It’s important to the radio, but there’s no information for us encoded in that, the information’s encoded in the way the frequency shifts a tiny little bit, and you’ll get FM radio.
“So I think something like that may be going on with orca calls. When you look at S1, the sound is not exactly the same every time you look at it. On the first order, it doesn’t sound the same. But if you look at them on a spectrogram, some of them are extended, or there’s wavering in the harmonic; some of them have more in the fourth or fifth harmonic than they do in other calls.”
Orcas also have demonstrated a capacity for mimicry. Scientists recording the sounds Northern Residents make began picking up the odd appearance of calls from other pods among whales that would socialize with those pods and not only when those other pods were present. At odd times well away from those pods, orcas were heard making their stereotyped calls to one another.
“Mimicking another group’s calls could be a way of referring to that group … or of communicating something about that group to one’s own family members,” said behavioral biologist Brigitte Weiss, who conducted the study, noting that it’s just as possible that these calls have no function at all. “Most likely, the answer lies somewhere in between.”
• • •
Perhaps the most striking case of orcas’ sound mimicry capacities involved a little whale named Luna. It was also one of the most striking manifestations of orcas’ empathy. Luna was a two-year-old male from the L pod of the Southern Residents—his number was L98—who showed up alone, quite mysteriously, in Nootka Sound, on the western side of Vancouver Island, in the summer of 2001. His appearance there coincided with the sudden and worrisome loss of four of L pod’s young males in the course of a single year and may have been connected to it, since one of the young males who died was Luna’s frequent companion. The suspicion is that sometime that winter while the L pod was foraging along the Continental Shelf, when the male was dying, Luna and the male wandered away from the rest of the pod, and then L98 found himself alone, after his companion died, in unfamiliar but protected waters with lots of available food.
The calf soon began making his presence known among the people who lived in Nootka Sound, notably those who used boats: fishermen, leisure boaters, loggers, and water-taxi operators. The affable and playful young orca would approach people in these boats and then, when they would turn off their engines, come right up to the edge of the boats and let people stroke and pet him. He would play around the boats, much to the delight of most of the humans who encountered him.
Luna in particular befriended the crew of a boat, dubbed the Uchuck III, a lovingly restored old wooden steamer painted sleek glossy black, that ran passengers and supplies up and down the Sound. At first, the boat slowed down when Luna approached, and its crew became familiar faces for the whale. After a while, the Uchuck would continue on its run, and Luna would follow, playing in the boat’s wake and delighting both crew and passengers. He also came up to local docks and engaged with people there. He was fond of playing with hoses that were lowered into the water within his reach; he would grab the hoses and squirt the water around, often hitting his human friends of the moment, who would laugh uproariously.
Not everyone was quite so enamored, however, particularly not the loggers and fishermen who were trying to work when Luna would interrupt them. Pretty soon he became a problem for the Canadian government’s wildlife biologists, who were concerned that his frequent contacts with humans would make it more difficult to reunite him with his family, as was their then-vague hope. They were also concerned that his frequent contact with boats might lead to Luna’s being injured by a bow or propeller. Complicating matters was that Luna had become a tourist draw. People began showing up at Gold River, the main town reachable by road on Nootka Sound, hoping to get a look at the whale, perhaps to even interact with it, and locals began taking them out in their boats so they could do just that.
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) announced it was instituting a policy of forced separation, requiring humans to keep their distance from the little whale and not to interact with him if he approached their boats. At first, this was enforced by the DFO’s overworked officers in Nootka Sound, but soon the job of enforcing the rules was placed under the control of the Luna Stewardship Project, led by a government biologist who had experience with orcas. This project employed private citizens to act as whale stewards. They would go out in pairs—most of the time, it was two women—in an official-looking boat and try to remind boaters not to interact with Luna when either they or he approached the other.
This turned out to be much easier said than done. Luna was actually very aggressive about seeking out human contact, and some of his favorite contact, as time went on, was with these stewards. If the DFO officers approached boats that were getting close to Luna, he would actually get in between them and force contact with both sets of humans. In one of the videos capturing these stewards in action, Luna can be seen spyhopping in between the two close craft and nuzzling the hapless steward, who is holding onto the side of the approaching boat from her own, even as she chastises its owners for getting too close and coming into contact with the whale. She can’t help but laugh, “Luna, you’re not helping!”
Eventually these stewards changed tactics, deliberately cultivating a relationship with Luna so that they could draw him away from other boaters and into unpopulated parts of the Sound. However, then the DFO officials in Victoria switched back and ordered the stewards to return to enforcing the rules they had created keeping boats separate from the whale—with, once again, a predictable lack of success.
Luna not only attracted tourists; scientists, too, were drawn to him, because the opportunity to observe a wild orca so closely provided unique data-collection opportunities. It was during one of these studies that he was observed mimicking not other orcas, but sea lions.
A team of researchers led by Andrew Foote recorded a number of Californi
a sea lion sounds while out in Nootka Sound following Luna. However, they also recorded a number of sounds that sounded like barks to the naked ear, but which when analyzed were not in the same harmonic range used by sea lions, but were instead in the range used by killer whales. Some of these barks were recorded when there were no sea lions observable, and only Luna was present. It was apparent that he was imitating their barks, perhaps calling to them, as though they too kept the lonely young whale company.
That was the adjective nearly everyone who encountered Luna used to describe him: lonely. He craved company, and the humans were happy to give it to him, DFO rules notwithstanding. Many of the locals took to looking after the young whale and petting him at the docks. One of them was ticketed by the local police for doing that and went before a local judge about the matter. She wound up with a $100 ticket.
Not that she regretted it. “Not at all. It’s the best $100 I ever spent,” she said, smiling.
“When you see wild whales, they look at you, but they carry on,” observed another longtime local. “This is a whole different thing. Because he doesn’t just sort of go on by and do his business; he comes up and looks at you and shows you stuff. He’s flashing his tail and doing all this within fifteen feet of your boat. He is trying to communicate with you.”
The sea lion barks were not the only thing that Luna mimicked. Two journalists who arrived in Nootka Sound in 2002, Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm, found they had the same difficulties avoiding contact with Luna as other boaters. He was particularly fond of pushing Parfit’s little inflatable boat around and sometimes played with it at the dock.
Of Orcas and Men Page 6