Speaking whale? Scientists are working on it.

In 2015, while sharing a two-person kayak in Monterey Bay just off the coast of California, biologist and filmmaker Tom Mustill and his friend Charlotte Kinloch suddenly faced a dire situation. 

A 30-ton humpback whale breached the water’s surface next to them and came down on the edge of their kayak, dislodging them from their watercraft in one swift, dizzying, and extraordinary moment. 

At first, the pair had a hard time getting others to believe their tale, until a video from a nearby boat showed up online. They became a viral news sensation overnight. 

The encounter with the whale energized rather than terrified Mustill, and he became determined to better understand these animals. The result of his global search for knowledge is coherently put together in his book “How To Speak Whale: A Voyage Into the Future of Animal Communication.” 

It’s a travelogue, a history lesson, a critique of the scientific community when it comes to animal studies, and a high-tech conservation game plan all wrapped into one book. Most of all it’s a captivating, thought-provoking read, leaving its audience with a greater sense of the complexity and inherent value of these sovereigns of the deep.

As Mustill discovered, even if he can’t presently ask a whale why it does what it does, there are still rewards to reap when we make the effort to learn just a smidgen more about the world around us. For instance, the author shares a brief history of legendary conservationist Roger Payne and his exploration of whale sounds in the 1960s and ’70s. At the time, the whaling industry was killing millions of these sea giants, reducing the numbers of blue whales “until just 0.1 percent of its population remained.” 

Payne took his recordings of whale sounds and turned them into an album in 1970: “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” He then convinced National Geographic to include copies of the audio disc in its January 1979 issue of the magazine. As millions of people became entranced by the strange, powerful sounds, it inspired protests around the world, putting pressure on the whaling industry. Now, thanks to the advocacy of an empathetic public, species like the blue whale are beginning to repopulate. 

It’s heartening to see how learning about whale sounds – including chirps, clicks, and calls – has encouraged greater compassion for these creatures. The author puts it this way: “The more we learn about other animals and discover evidence of their manifold capacities, the more we care, and this alters how we treat them.”

At the heart of Mustill’s book beats a high regard for nonhuman species. Despite an underlying bias in the scientific community that reinforces the place of humans as superior, decades of research show that animals have more in common with humankind than we realize. For example, some cetaceans make friendships and grieve when one of their own dies. They play, enjoy looking at themselves in the mirror, and have different cultures of behavior depending upon where they grew up. 

The research is ongoing. Thanks to the combined talents of several computer engineers from Silicon Valley, people who have worked for Twitter and Firefox, animal research is growing at a faster pace and at a larger, more detailed scale than ever before. 

Researchers have new tools at their disposal, including drones both in the water and on the surface, as well as small recorders on and around the whales. Using the latest software innovations, scientists are finally able to not only harvest colossal amounts of data, but also sift and sort through it in significantly less time. With their research, the Cetacean Translation Initiative is striving to build a kind of Google Translate for animals.

It’s Mustill’s hope that these ongoing studies on the ocean, like his book, will help make plain that cetaceans are intelligent, multifaceted creatures, worthy of our utmost care.