Ken O'Sullivan

Well, they're finding discernible patterns.

After recording thousands of hours of communication clicks between sperm whales in Dominica, which there was a lot of animals there, they're finding these discernible patterns between the animals when they're effectively speaking to each other.

and that some of those discernible patterns are repeated.

Now, what does that mean?

So if you didn't speak English and you recorded my last two sentences, you'd say discernible patterns, discernible patterns repeated.

You'd say, oh, there are sounds there that are being reused and reused in different orders.

And what they're saying is that if you break a language down to its most fundamental parts, so you're looking at an alphabet or you're looking at syllables, consonants, vowels, etc.

And they're hypothesizing that, well, they're not so far.

First of all, that shows that these animals have a sophisticated communication between each other.

And they're then hypothesizing because we have a shared ancestry, maybe 90 or 100 million years ago.

that it's a language and that they evolved in a similar but different way to us in terms of how they communicate with each other.

Yeah, so we were about 65 kilometres west of Mayo at the edge of the Rockall trough, which is the start of the real deep water in the Atlantic.

It goes down to 2,000, 3,000 metres.

And we had a spotter plane searching the area for us because it's a vast area and they found two sperm whales.

So they gave us the coordinates, but by the time we got there, 12 or 13 kilometres, the animals had dived.

So I put our hydrophone, underwater microphone, into the water and that's what we recorded.

So they're clearly sperm whale clicks that are going on there.

There's also a whistle, which is probably from a pilot whale.

And they use those clicks.

They use the sounds for two reasons.