Ear: Whales

Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been around for decades, but the SETI Institute at the University of California, Davis, and the Alaska Whale Foundation stuck to Earth this time to communicate with non-human intelligence.

The Whale-SETI team, while researching humpback whale communication systems, had a “conversation” with Twain the whale, SETI.org reported.

Researchers played a recorded humpback call through an underwater speaker, and Twain came up, circled the boat and replied to the signal. The chat lasted for 20 minutes, and Twain replied to each call, even matching the length of time between each signal.

Dr. Brenda McCowan, of the University of California, Davis School of Veterinary Medicine, was part of the team that conceived and designed the experiments. “We believe this is the first such communicative exchange, between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language,’” she wrote in a PeerJ article. Future acoustic interactions between humans and nonhuman earthly species are planned.