Welcome to on the media's midweek

podcast. I'm Brooke Lydstone. Just for a moment let's turn our attention

away from the prackling media and direct it thousands of feet beneath the ocean surface where even

submarines can't venture. You might think it would be as silent as a tomb down

there, but it's not. What you're hearing is a conversation of sorts between

multiple sperm wells off the coast of Dominica in the East Caribbean Sea.

These are animals that spend most of their life in the darkness of the deep ocean

and only a few minutes at the surface at any one time before diving back down.

Shane Gero is the lead biologist at CEDI or the Cetetian translation initiative.

He's been studying sperm wells and their endangered

way of life for two decades. They have the largest brain that may exist ever

depending on what we find outside of our universe.

They're the size of a school bus, maybe even as long as two school buses and weigh as

much as ten of them. So they're fundamentally having a different experience of the world than we are as

advanced primates running around on Earth.

But maybe not quite so different after all.

After years of analyzing thousands of recordings of sperm wells

clicking away at each other,

Shane and his team at CEDI discovered in May that they use a phonetic alphabet just like we do.

It's composed of a string of clicks grouped into over 150 codas. This discovery says Shane might be the first of many steps that could lead to actually

translating what these sea giants are saying and saving their lives.

Families of sperm whales use dozens and dozens of these different types of codas.

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