i’m struggling a little with the methodology used by the scientist who tried to "communicate" with whales by playing specific whale recordings back to them. i don‘t really see how her findings support her claims about the function or meaning of these wump calls when you don’t even have a control call to see if they wouldn‘t just repeat any random call (especially considering the artificial nature of the playbacks). also, i always assumed whales recognize each others voices by their frequency and/or other sound identifiers like a lot of other animals do so it seems a bit silly to argue the wump call means something like "hello, i am…" but i‘m not a marine biologist so what the hell do i know about animal behavior and language.
i’m struggling a little with the methodology used by the scientist who tried to "communicate" with whales by playing specific whale recordings back to them. i don‘t really see how her findings support her claims about the function or meaning of these wump calls when you don’t even have a control call to see if they wouldn‘t just repeat any random call (especially considering the artificial nature of the playbacks). also, i always assumed whales recognize each others voices by their frequency and/or other sound identifiers like a lot of other animals do so it seems a bit silly to argue the wump call means something like "hello, i am…" but i‘m not a marine biologist so what the hell do i know about animal behavior and language.
