Mason Youngblood, a postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University's Institute for Advanced Computational Science, has conducted a study revealing intriguing similarities between whale communication and human speech. The research, published in Science Advances, suggests that whales not only communicate with complexity but also with efficiency akin to human language.
Youngblood's analysis involved vocal sequences from 16 whale species compared against 51 human languages. His findings indicate that many whales "compress" their calls to enhance efficiency, mirroring the way humans optimize speech. Notably, eleven whale species demonstrate Menzerath’s law, where longer vocal sequences consist of shorter elements. Additionally, some species like humpback and blue whales adhere to Zipf’s law of abbreviation, using shorter sounds more frequently.
These findings imply that whales have developed streamlined communication methods similar to humans. This evolution could be aimed at conserving energy and evading predators.