For The Wild - IN THE COMPANY OF HUMPBACKS S1：E1

00:00:00.000 Hey friends, Ayana here. It is a crisp new season and we are so excited to bring you a

00:00:12.960 brand new series, In the Company of Humpbacks. Over three episodes, we'll wander the waters

00:00:18.680 off Alaska, exploring the lives, the thrums, and the migrations of humpback whales. With

00:00:25.220 stories and insight from Fred Sharp, Rachel Mead, and Joe Olsut. This series is full of sonic

00:00:31.500 exploration, migration stories, and research discoveries. But it's also about something

00:00:37.640 deeper. Curiosity, wonder, and the relationships we build with the more-than-human world.

00:00:44.940 Along the way, we move between science and story, the technical and the magical,

00:00:49.580 between whale thrums and the questions we carry.

00:00:53.800 This journey came to life thanks to the generosity and care

00:00:56.780 of the Five Fingers Lighthouse and the Alaska Whale Foundation.

00:01:00.820 You can learn more about their work at furtherwild.world.

00:01:08.020 Now episode one begins with a simple impulse,

00:01:11.180 the desire to understand.

00:01:13.920 For all you whale geeks and sound nerds out there,

00:01:16.900 this is your episode.

00:01:18.880 Joe Olson and Fred Sharp guide us deep into the technical world

00:01:22.400 of humpback thrums and aerial whale sounds.

00:01:25.780 They give us the vocabulary and the listening tools

00:01:28.620 that'll carry us through the rest of the series.

00:01:32.180 Along the way, we explore questions like,

00:01:34.740 what is whale communication?

00:01:36.760 And how do these thrums travel across the ocean?

00:01:39.920 And what might careful listening teach us

00:01:42.420 about connection with the more-than-human world?

00:01:45.040 Think of this episode as your entry point.

00:01:47.260 into the sonic exploration at the heart of the series.

00:01:58.940 There's no doubt an exciting time,

00:02:00.720 and there are tools at our disposal right now

00:02:03.400 that we couldn't have dreamed of even a few years ago,

00:02:06.560 so I think the future is bright.

00:02:08.180 we're listening

00:02:17.680 I think

00:02:18.760 we're hearing some

00:02:20.900 a little gurgle

00:02:24.420 a little winnie call

00:02:26.120 and you texted the file

00:02:27.680 let's have a look

00:02:29.100 okay

00:02:33.500 so

00:02:35.100 we'll try listening again

00:02:37.340 Let's see what we got.

00:02:53.500 Did you get any low frequency?

00:02:55.420 It's very low, bassy.

00:02:57.580 Yeah, yes, it is.

00:02:58.560 Yep, exactly.

00:03:00.120 Yeah, tell us about this sound that we just heard.

00:03:03.980 This low bass, kind of groan almost.

00:03:07.340 So this was in the evening.

00:03:10.940 Things were getting dark, and we couldn't really see the whales,

00:03:14.300 but it was a beautiful evening,

00:03:16.820 and they sort of come and press around the island after the sun goes down.

00:03:21.080 There's something about the prey environment

00:03:22.620 where they start to become a little bit more structure

00:03:27.220 and pinnacle and reef associated.

00:03:30.120 And so it's really cool.

00:03:31.940 We can just hear individual whales out there.

00:03:34.120 Even though we can't see them,

00:03:35.080 And because these thrums appear to have individual nuances to them, we can sort of track this, how this one, as it's either being pushed by the flood tide or the whales asleep or it's actively pursuing prey.

00:03:46.180 We don't often know the behavioral context, but there's something about the nightfall that gets these whales going with these low frequency near infrasound.

00:03:57.260 And it took us quite a while of listening and peering.

00:04:00.300 And then we needed Joe's extra sharp ear.

00:04:04.080 So, Joe, tell us how you track these underwater component down.

00:04:09.420 Yeah, well, and it actually wasn't my ear, it was my eye that was able to find it

00:04:13.440 because it's easy to hear, like Fred was saying,

00:04:16.940 it's really easy to hear the sounds in air.

00:04:21.560 And if you look at this image that I'm sharing with you,

00:04:27.840 and you don't need to really understand what a spectrogram is and all the details of it.

00:04:32.900 It's like a musical score, isn't it, basically?

00:04:35.740 In a way, but the important thing, though,

00:04:39.180 is that you're looking at the sound pitch, the frequency,

00:04:43.120 and it gets higher as you go up on the screen,

00:04:47.140 just like music, right?

00:04:49.220 So, in fact, this bottom image almost looks like

00:04:54.060 it could be the lines on sheet music,

00:04:57.360 and those are just the different harmonics

00:04:59.380 that the whale's producing.

00:05:01.340 And so as time goes on, it goes from left to right.

00:05:04.180 It's just time moving and then the frequency changing up and down.

00:05:08.360 The color tells you how strong it is.

00:05:11.100 And this is just a relative measure.

00:05:13.840 So it's not an absolute.

00:05:15.860 We don't know really how loud it is, but it's just relative to everything else.

00:05:19.620 So you can see on the air one, it's mostly black around these lines, meaning that what is not the sound that we're interested in is really quiet.

00:05:29.400 but the sound itself is really loud relative to that if you look at the underwater one you notice

00:05:35.620 that there's all this light blue and colors all around and that the the line that we're interested

00:05:41.160 in which is just above the one on the screen below or the window below in the air is just a faint

00:05:48.660 green so on this scale it means that there's very little difference between the sound we're

00:05:53.620 interested in and all the other sounds that are being produced in the water so it's really

00:05:58.500 difficult to identify these sounds because it's hard to hear when you've got a sound that's just

00:06:04.680 barely louder than everything else that's around. And so what we were looking for is this shape of

00:06:13.160 the sound in air. And then I started scrolling through the sounds in the water to see if I could

00:06:19.560 find anything that looked similar at roughly the same time. And this is an example when we found

00:06:25.600 one. And the water one showed up earlier than the one in the air. And that's what we expect

00:06:33.800 because the speed of sound in water is much faster than the speed of sound in air. It's

00:06:37.480 about four and a half times faster. But if I click on this at the beginning of the air

00:06:42.920 sound, I'm sorry, the beginning of the water sound, okay, and then I move over to where

00:06:49.700 the air sound starts, you can see that's approximately 1.2 seconds. So the sound and

00:06:57.300 water reached the hydrophone 1.2 seconds faster than the sound and air. And the thing that I got

00:07:03.580 excited about is that that means we can calculate roughly how far away the whale is without even

00:07:09.640 seeing it. We're just using a hydrophone and a microphone. What do you think the whale is saying

00:07:18.380 And how do you differentiate a sound like this from other sounds so that you can categorize it or even begin to, I guess?

00:07:28.800 Yeah, great question.

00:07:30.020 And, you know, when we first started detecting these, it's really intuitively pleasing to think about that these are a form of communication.

00:07:39.180 And, you know, humpback whales are extremely verbose underwater with their social chatter and their songs and when they're screaming at the herring to chase them up to the surface.

00:07:49.820 And so when we hear these coming through the air, we're already really inured to thinking that these are very communicative species.

00:07:59.700 And this has got to be some crazy, more, you know, perhaps some sort of long range rumble.

00:08:03.860 I've found some food over here, or we've got some metal, some killer whales, keep your distance, or we've got some metal, some killer whales, get over here, need your assistance.

00:08:14.380 But, you know, so when you assume communication, it presupposes, there's just certain predictions, there's certain corollaries of communication.

00:08:24.700 If a signal's being used for animals to talk, well, then you expect there to be kind of a conversation of a back and forth, you know, a volley of like, hey, what's going on?

00:08:32.520 Okay, I'm doing okay.

00:08:33.020 And so that's the first thing you also would expect sounds to be able to be detected.

00:08:39.440 You have a very specific sender and a very specific receiver.

00:08:42.980 The sender is usually trying to bend the receiver to its will so that they can get through the day or get what they need.

00:08:52.020 And oftentimes it's a cooperative venture, so it's a win-win situation.

00:08:55.240 But you do expect, not only do you expect there to be a call and response, but you expect to see some behavioral change.

00:09:00.160 come on over here or dive down to 60 feet now that's where the that's where the krill layer

00:09:06.800 is most abundant or if it's a mom calf solicitation cry you expect those two to get closer together

00:09:13.600 and then once they once the mom and the calf are together then that call falls away because

00:09:18.000 they've achieved their goal and so with communication we expect certain we also expect

00:09:24.060 it to be really detectable by this receiver and the sender right now there's no known mechanism

00:09:28.960 for a mist-to-seat whale, a baleen whale,

00:09:32.600 with the humpback belongs to be able to detect sound

00:09:36.360 that's moving through the air.

00:09:38.260 It doesn't mean they're not doing it, but we just don't have any.

00:09:40.820 I mean, is there sound receptors on the blowhole?

00:09:42.620 I mean, what's going to be above the water?

00:09:43.940 We know that the air-water interface, the surface of the ocean,

00:09:46.320 is almost like a perfect mirror in terms of just a very small fraction

00:09:51.100 of the sound can get through that air-water interface

00:09:54.380 because water is 800 times denser than air.

00:09:56.940 sound just, sound wants to stay underwater and it bounces back. And then when the air sounds,

00:10:02.500 they're having a really hard time getting into the water. And so, um, when we, when we, when we

00:10:08.280 just, we just couldn't find these, the underwater component until Joe had his, had his, um, expert

00:10:13.960 eyes. Oh, we are picking up a little bit of ghosting there. It's something is being produced.

00:10:18.280 So if it was communication, you know, and if it's especially for a long range communication,

00:10:22.820 that signal should be strong. You know, it should have some power. It should be able to transmit

00:10:28.000 through wave slap and snapping shrimp and even, you know, vessel noise. And so we're just not

00:10:34.380 seeing that. So that kind of militates against the notion of communication. And also the fact

00:10:40.940 that they just appear to originate from these animals kind of randomly. You know, their breathing

00:10:45.380 is sort of a random thing and the thrums are produced by a raspberry type puckering of the

00:10:50.460 blow hole and that is associated with a breathing cycle and breathing is something that animals can

00:10:57.540 do it's certainly under conscious control and certainly cetaceans but oftentimes it's just

00:11:01.600 it's just um it's your breathing is responding to your uh socializing or your pursuit of prey

00:11:09.360 and then you you're down below and you're swimming around and blowing bubble nets and lunging and

00:11:13.440 engulfing and then oh got to go back to surface to breathe and so you're you're going up to breathe

00:11:18.040 And then you have these potentially incidental sounds produced during breathing.

00:11:23.200 And so once you get a bunch of animals out pursuing prey independently, they're kind of random to each other.

00:11:28.500 And we don't hear these sounds clustering in time and space suggestive of communication.

00:11:34.580 And then we did our darn tootin best appear into the below the human hearing level by playing with various satellite dishes and various parabolics,

00:11:45.120 converting them to concentrate more sound energy on the microphone so we could see if there was

00:11:50.940 an infrasonic component and i haven't found that either and um so we're science often works by not

00:12:00.100 being able to definitively show that something is true but that um you've been able to show that

00:12:06.880 your other um ideas about mom say mom calf pairs well everybody seems to be doing this so it's not

00:12:12.240 just mom and calves. So probably not that. And so you started eliminating notions until

00:12:16.100 last individual standing, last one standing. And, um, so some sort of, um, um, maintenance

00:12:23.160 activity as we respected on earlier. And Joe, what are your thoughts?

00:12:29.700 Well, and I'm, I'm not the biologist, but I, I do think that it, that it could still be

00:12:36.200 indicative of emotional state um you know that it's not just they're not just randomly breathing

00:12:44.760 and sometimes getting this sound but it could be like fred you and i had and and others had just

00:12:50.780 talked about well it could be just where you're having that feeling of just you've you've you've

00:12:57.620 had a lot of activity and now you're just relaxing and when and when your body relaxes all your

00:13:03.320 little um uh your muscles and your your lips and everything get a little bit more relaxed and so

00:13:10.840 when you breathe out you just make that raspberry sound so it could be indicative of that interesting

00:13:16.580 yes so it's kind of a kind of a um kind of a or kind of like a groan a groan of satiation or

00:13:22.240 contentment um and i kind of get that feeling it certainly sounds like it um the other evening when

00:13:27.860 we were um we were reflecting with the residents of petersburg who live out sandy beach road over

00:13:33.240 overlooking frederick sound and that was the kind of general consensus that doesn't sound at all

00:13:39.040 aggressive it sounds like um something was just accomplished and a sigh of contentment or um

00:13:47.380 so yeah and so i mean by the on the other hand it's like um we know that adaptive sounds for

00:13:58.020 maintenance in other contexts like with the african hunting dogs that sneeze for maintenance

00:14:02.960 of the airway and the sinuses, but they also sneeze as a communication to get their groupmates

00:14:12.400 roused for the hunt. And so we just may not have yet sampled the behavioral context where these

00:14:18.960 potentially maintenance sounds or background sounds are pressed into service for communication. So

00:14:24.180 there's still lots we have to learn, but our initial feedback suggests we don't know what

00:14:30.800 the hell's going on can we hear another sound

00:14:34.660 so here's a nice um strong one that um it's pretty bold and it um

00:14:47.220 it's it's cool i mean so okay so in support of in support of a um potential communication function

00:14:56.560 is that not all thrums are created equal.

00:14:59.180 We're finding quite a bit of variation,

00:15:00.800 and we don't know to what degree that represents

00:15:03.040 individual variation, consistent, very identifiable variation,

00:15:06.560 or does that represent just changing emotional states?

00:15:10.380 But some of these are pretty intense.

00:15:14.420 So we're going to listen to this strong thumb,

00:15:20.100 strong thrum, right, header.

00:15:23.520 And some of them are longer in duration.

00:15:26.560 than others nice little powerful one there it had a bit of an inflection kind of like it was um

00:15:35.920 like sometimes um the animals are maybe a little uncertain when they produce it or maybe there's a

00:15:44.000 sometimes it'll be paired or it'll come in multiple chunks like

00:15:48.560 sometimes it feels kind of forced like

00:15:50.640 like so where these all could be tied to different interior emotional states of the animal um or if

00:16:00.040 it's a maintenance thing like they're backwashing their baleen it could be whereas it's just

00:16:04.240 representing utilitarian back pressure how it's um being um how water jet is being pushed on or

00:16:10.320 the tongue is being pushed onto the baleen or or but you know we've got you know what 50 million

00:16:16.780 years of separation with these beings you know they went back into the ocean and we stayed on

00:16:22.380 land and so this could be something that we haven't even thought of yet you know some sort

00:16:26.720 of a maintenance or interior thing or triggered to some emotions that um we may have once had

00:16:33.640 and then evolutionary got winnowed out or something will evolve one day or something

00:16:37.640 we'll only be able to surmise but that's why we love working with humpbacks because

00:16:42.140 There's always two steps ahead in keeping you guessing.

00:16:50.300 I want to pause for a second and share a little behind-the-scenes story.

00:16:55.120 So Fred and I have known each other for years now,

00:16:57.520 and we always run into each other on Chichikov Island in southeast Alaska,

00:17:01.860 where his field office is.

00:17:03.720 And every time I see him, he brings the biggest smile to my face,

00:17:07.900 And I usually a little giggle because of this very Dr. Seuss-like spirit.

00:17:14.540 Same place, different year, and the conversations just keep getting longer, which I'm so appreciative of.

00:17:22.120 Now this summer, we ran into each other again, picking blueberries on this little boardwalk trail.

00:17:27.060 And we just stayed there for hours, talking about whales and politics, AI, the oceans, Alaska life.

00:17:36.440 and everything kind of tangled together it felt really easy like oh yeah we are kin

00:17:44.480 and a few months later i'm at my neighbor's house picking cherries totally in it hands full not

00:17:50.840 stopping and fred calls he's got joe on speaker and they're like you have to come to five fingers

00:17:57.780 lighthouse and i'm thinking okay that sounds amazing and also kind of insane like tiny island

00:18:06.340 very, very remote. Cliffs, storms, my toddler in tow, boats, tides, timing, no helicopter,

00:18:15.520 just so many logistics. And still, I said yes. Because this is honestly why I do this work.

00:18:26.060 I love saying yes to wild invitations, to people who are deeply in relationship with place,

00:18:31.900 to stories that come from the land and water and the more-than-human world.

00:18:37.980 And I guess that's what I want to name here.

00:18:40.660 For the Wild is shifting.

00:18:42.660 We're becoming a studio now,

00:18:44.620 partnering with people and groups who want help telling their stories.

00:18:48.400 If you're holding a place or a project or a campaign,

00:18:52.340 and you're feeling like this needs to be told,

00:18:56.220 well, that's something we do.

00:18:58.400 We only take a few projects each year,

00:19:00.320 But if you feel called to reach out, to invite us in, we'd love to hear from you.

00:19:07.540 Email us at connect at for the wild dot world.

00:19:11.600 Okay, back to the conversation.

00:19:17.320 I really liked when we were at Five Fingers and you talked about why or whale language at all is not just for our

00:19:29.980 interest of course there's beauty to that but when when it's reciprocal when it's like okay

00:19:37.720 hey whales we want to learn about your language because we want to be in right relationship with

00:19:44.000 you and the more that we learn about you the more that we can show up the more that we can learn

00:19:49.400 about each other we know how to be together so i really appreciated hearing about how learning

00:19:57.000 about the whale language can actually act as a reciprocal relationship practice absolutely yeah

00:20:04.060 we just knowing that they have some some structures or a little high order communication system since

00:20:10.280 you know we're one of the ultimate communicating species and so we feel a little more akin to them

00:20:15.300 and obviously if we could you know get a better appreciation of the meaning and function of these

00:20:21.380 sounds we might be able to ask them where it hurts and they can tell us and by understanding

00:20:26.700 which sounds are the most used, the most frequently found in their lexicon.

00:20:32.660 And, you know, the more common sounds, and we're talking more specifically now about

00:20:37.560 their underwater vocals, you know, those that are used more frequently, we assume are of

00:20:42.160 greater importance.

00:20:43.880 And so we look at those frequently used sounds and we ask, are these ones being masked by

00:20:50.700 anthropogenic noise, by ship noise?

00:20:52.620 And so it's potential that critical sounds like a solicitation for help or an alarm call associated with predators or a bonanza food patch.

00:21:03.680 Are we masking those and making it harder for animals to, across the summer months, to just continuously degrading their ability to communicate and feed?

00:21:15.660 And so they're leaving to Hawaii with reduced body weight and fuel storage.

00:21:22.120 It's all entirely speculation, but you get the point that there's lots of ways we can gain insight into their lives and needs by understanding their communication system.

00:21:36.960 Is there another sound that you could play as?

00:21:39.700 Yeah, let's find another fun one.

00:21:41.680 um some of them are really low in frequency let's have a little listen here

00:21:50.380 yeah it's cool so vibrational yeah yeah still you know you always have that and i still even

00:22:00.840 at kilometers away you're still picking up those flapping nairs right those like i don't like to

00:22:07.120 call them raspberries or bronx tears how about nair berries okay so joe let's pop over and take

00:22:13.840 it's it's it's like an instrument really yes it is it is it's almost like one of those droning

00:22:18.320 instruments or like a bagpipe or some there's like it's such yeah some sort of reed instrument

00:22:24.800 yeah right instrument joe do you want to pop over to the um to figure one and we can look

00:22:32.460 at some of the spectrograms on these

00:22:34.220 that's great yeah almost like that was like a purr yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

00:22:45.460 it's beautiful it is when i listen back to the recordings with both the water and the thrums

00:22:53.880 it's very soothing to me um i don't know if they feel soothed by the sound of their own voice but

00:23:00.700 it's whatever frequencies they're giving off it's really it is it's like meditative or it's

00:23:07.400 it's um it's something it's very regulating to the nervous system it's almost gregorian

00:23:13.240 in its um and because it's perched up in our hearing range we know we can grapple with it

00:23:19.700 and we can unlike you know apparently some sounds below human hearing into the um subsonic or the

00:23:27.200 infrasonic range those i understand can actually be kind of annoying instead of anxiety whereas

00:23:32.760 these low frequent they're almost like a gregorian chants more or um some sort of like deep north

00:23:40.620 umbrian hornpipe or uh something and and the benefit of that is they travel for um travel

00:23:48.620 for miles you'd be really interesting in our to actually get some of these very deep thrums with

00:23:53.740 a really good speaker and then play those underwater as part of the playback experiments

00:23:58.420 to see how if the whales respond to picking up on this infrasound underwater.

00:24:05.840 Well, A, I'm curious, when you are doing playbacks or when people are doing playbacks, why?

00:24:11.920 Why are they doing these playbacks?

00:24:13.440 What are they learning?

00:24:14.900 I don't love the notion of trying to, quote, outsmart the whales or trick the whales into

00:24:20.340 thinking that we are them to get information from them.

00:24:23.200 I mean, I know I'm I'm I'm really humanizing this discussion in that way, but I I just want to bring that up.

00:24:32.080 Like, what is the what is the goal usually or maybe there's multiple goals I'm imagining for playback and how do you do it ethically?

00:24:40.000 And yeah, if you want to breach the A.I. conversation about that, I'm curious.

00:24:46.400 Yes. Well, first of all, like you were at the lighthouse and you heard what happens when a

00:24:53.140 festival goes by. First of all, we are absolutely bombarding these animals with mechanical noise

00:24:58.320 and drivetrains and singing propellers and under sonar and seismic exploration. So we are sending

00:25:09.220 a lot of sound onto their hearing apparatus, their tympanas.

00:25:13.700 And we do that unconsciously most of the time and abusively and unthinkingly.

00:25:20.020 And so if it does mean in the pursuit of knowledge so how we can be better conservationists

00:25:29.160 and share the oceans with them and get some appreciation for our sounds and our functions

00:25:32.760 of our sound, yes, it may at times result in some small experiments where we play back

00:25:38.500 some sounds. And the whale's like, what's that? And they come over and there's, you know, we play

00:25:43.080 back the sound of an old friend and they come over and yes, we expect there to be some expectancy

00:25:46.720 violation. And the animal was being initially confused. And so we did one experiment. This was

00:25:52.080 in 2019 with my colleagues on the Whale SETI team. We did a playback to an individual, a known whale

00:25:58.660 called Twain. And the whale came over to the boat and was initially like, you could just tell by

00:26:04.460 its demeanor like it almost just kind of froze for a few moments and then it gave a couple of

00:26:09.040 little kind of a kind of that wheezy blow indicating some measure of um excitement or

00:26:16.740 disturbance or um arousal non-sexual arousal just like what and then but then it kind of settled in

00:26:24.620 you know kind of relaxed and was okay these are people and it was like okay well what's going on

00:26:29.040 like and so it hung out for 20 minutes with us and we just bounced the same sound back and forth and

00:26:34.220 we could change the interval that the animal, like if we only waited 10 seconds, the animal

00:26:38.180 would wait 10 seconds. We waited a minute, it would wait a minute. So it's like clearly there

00:26:41.440 was some ability to perceive each other. And so, but that's just the nature of a lot of playback

00:26:47.220 experiments is that, is that you, you observe the sound in the wild that animals make and you get a

00:26:53.800 nice library of their sounds. You look at the behavioral context that the sounds are produced

00:26:58.280 in to infer potential function, as we've discussed a bunch, you know, mom-infant, you know, separation

00:27:04.520 cries, or come here, or get out of here, or, and so by, by initially by, quote-unquote, tricking the

00:27:11.700 animal to thinking that you are one of their own species, a conspecific, you want to test ideas

00:27:18.280 about the sound, and, you know, if in fact it is an assembly cry, there's an assembly call that

00:27:25.060 are making, we could actually coax animals over to us with this sound, that has huge conservation

00:27:31.180 value. I think if animals get stuck in marinas and up rivers or are in shallows and trying to

00:27:37.540 navigate their way out or are caught in a lagoon during a lower tidal cycle, it's like

00:27:43.460 if these sounds are associated with affiliation and approaching each other or some sort of

00:27:49.980 contact call, I mean, that's huge for conservation. So yes, I would say in the short term, if we

00:27:54.460 confuse a couple animals, but what it can tell us about conservation tools and also, again,

00:28:00.760 a deeper appreciation that they do have structure and a diversity of meaning to their sounds. And

00:28:07.820 that makes us appreciate them even more, obviously. And so I think the conservation

00:28:13.460 benefits way outweigh the not being able to ask for their permission. I mean, it's kind of like,

00:28:19.680 it's different between doing an experiment on an animal as opposed to with an animal.

00:28:24.460 and I feel like, you know, there's room for that, too.

00:28:27.400 So we have two basic types of playbacks,

00:28:28.900 the ones we just described where you want them to think

00:28:31.860 you're one of their own kind to see how they respond to the call,

00:28:34.800 but then there's the one like we had with Twain

00:28:37.420 where the whale hung around long enough

00:28:40.120 that clearly knew it was interacting with people,

00:28:41.840 and so we kind of like to get out, you know, before we start,

00:28:45.380 the ones where we're trying to do these dynamic playbacks

00:28:47.400 where it's like, yes, we're definitely people.

00:28:49.740 We would be very interested in communicating with you

00:28:53.220 to try to see if we can build on a basic communication system

00:28:58.420 and get you interested in hopefully enjoying this

00:29:01.860 and maybe even get to the points where you come over and initiate.

00:29:05.000 And that's the fun of doing playbacks,

00:29:07.160 this research from an island environment,

00:29:09.400 because it's a physical, it has spatial,

00:29:14.120 and we do it every year at the same time,

00:29:15.920 late summer temporal consistency where willing individuals

00:29:20.140 can come and find us again,

00:29:21.180 and we can build on our previous dialogues.

00:29:24.600 So, yeah, I think they're robust animals.

00:29:27.620 They're clever animals.

00:29:28.840 I mean, in the face of incredible human,

00:29:31.800 you know, obviously global whaling

00:29:33.980 and their depletion and ship strikes

00:29:36.400 and noise and entanglement and pollutants

00:29:39.580 and ocean acidification

00:29:41.800 and competing for food resources

00:29:44.020 and digestion of plastics.

00:29:46.000 Despite all that, the humpbacks are,

00:29:49.060 you know, they've surged back,

00:29:50.280 you know kind of the 14 global distinct population segments are are considered and so it's like

00:29:56.560 you know they're a pretty robust species i think we need to give them a little credit that

00:30:00.720 our little punny little playbacks experiments i relative to what humanity gives them i think is

00:30:06.940 someone i think we're giving them a gift and an opportunity for them to hopefully one day

00:30:10.440 tell their story and how we can do right by them no doubt an exciting time and there are tools at

00:30:17.240 our disposal right now that we couldn't have dreamed of even a few years ago so i think the

00:30:23.120 future is bright and hopefully we hope we will learn things that we again we can be better

00:30:28.280 ocean stewards yeah that's pretty that's really like refreshing

00:30:33.240 all right friends that's where we'll leave things for today projects like in the company of humpbacks

00:30:41.800 don't happen alone. They unfold through long conversations, through time on the water,

00:30:47.700 through shared curiosity, and through a whole constellation of people who care deeply about

00:30:52.540 these whales and the places they call home. This series grew alongside research and storytelling,

00:30:59.040 connected to the Alaska Whale Foundation and the Five Fingers Lighthouse, along with many other

00:31:04.340 generous folks who shared their time, their knowledge, and their boats with us along the way.

00:31:10.120 It's also the first series we're releasing through a new studio model at For the Wild,

00:31:14.860 something we've been quietly building behind the scenes.

00:31:17.840 A space where partners come to us with the stories they want told,

00:31:21.880 and together, we collaborate on bringing these stories into the world.

00:31:26.080 A big thank you as well to the American Cetacean Society,

00:31:29.620 Barnacle Foods, and the Alaska Fisheries Development Foundation

00:31:32.920 for supporting the work that made this series possible.

00:31:36.580 And of course, to you.

00:31:39.380 Thanks for listening.

00:31:41.020 Thanks for wandering these waters with us.

00:31:43.560 And thanks for being a part of this beautiful listening community we're building together.

00:31:48.220 I'll pass things over now to Victoria for a few credits and ways to stay connected.

00:32:02.500 Thank you for listening to this episode of For the Wild series in the company of humpbacks.

00:32:08.400 For the Wild is produced by Ayanna Young, Erica Ekram, Julia Jackson, Ori Bittle, and Victoria Pham.

00:32:17.900 This series features music and sound design created by the For the Wild Studio.

00:32:23.100 You can also join us on Patreon for access to extended episodes,

00:32:27.320 including the extended version of this very episode,

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00:32:33.840 As For The Wild continues its transformation into the For The Wild studio

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00:32:50.100 for updates, reflections and upcoming releases

00:32:52.880 Thank you for being with us

00:32:55.300 and as always, thank you for listening

00:33:03.840 Thank you.

For The Wild - March 26, 2026

IN THE COMPANY OF HUMPBACKS S1：E1

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