Below is an excerpt from “Life on a Little-Known Planet” Written by Elizabeth Colbert.
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Life on a little-known planet: Dispatches from a changing world
David Gruber began his almost impossibly colorful career studying the blue stripes of grunts off the coast of Belize. He was a college student whose job was to chase fish at night. He sailed by the stars and slept in a tent on the beach. “It was a dream,” he recalled. “I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was doing what I thought a marine biologist would do.”
Gruber continued to map forest patches in Guyana and calculate how much water would be needed to restore the Everglades in Florida. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the carbon cycle in the ocean and became a professor of biology at the City University of New York. Along the way, he became interested in green fluorescent protein. Green fluorescent protein is naturally synthesized by jellyfish, but with a little gene editing, it can be produced by almost any living thing, including humans. While working in the Solomon Islands northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including fluorescent sharks, and new questions arose. How do fluorescent sharks appear to other fluorescent sharks? Gruber enlisted the help of optics researchers to build a special “shark eye” camera. (Sharks can only see in blue and green. Fluorescence, it turns out, shows up in sharks as a greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellyfish at Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, trying to figure out how exactly sharks manufacture their glowing molecules. This led him to wonder about how jellyfish experience the world. Gruber turned to other collaborators to develop a robot that could handle jellyfish with the same delicacy.
“What I wanted to know is, is there a way to connect robots and humans to create empathy?” he told me.
In 2017, Gruber won a one-year fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, Massachusetts. There he came across a book about a free diver who jumped into the ocean with sperm whales. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity and he began researching animals.
Sperm whales, the world’s largest predators, spend most of their lives hunting. To find prey (usually squid) in the darkness of the deep ocean, they rely on echolocation. A special organ in the head generates a stream of clicks that bounces off solid (or semi-solid) objects. Sperm whales also emit rapid clicks known as codas, which they exchange with each other. The interaction seems to have the structure of a conversation.
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One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute listening to tapes of sperm whale chatter when Shafie Goldwasser, another researcher at the institute, walked by. Mr. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. At the time, she was hosting a seminar on machine learning. Machine learning was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Perhaps, Goldwasser thought, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of whale exchanges.
“It wasn’t a joke at all, but it was almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recalls. “But David really got into it.”
Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of deciphering the code to Radcliffe’s third associate, Michael Bronstein. Bronstein is also a computer scientist and currently serves as the DeepMind AI Professor at the University of Oxford.
“This sounded like probably the craziest project I’d ever heard,” Bronstein told me. “But David has this kind of power, the ability to persuade people and drag them along. I thought it would be a great thing to try.”
Gruber continued to push the idea forward. Experts who found this both bizarre and fascinating included Robert Wood, a robotics engineer at Harvard University, and Daniela Russ, who heads MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Thus, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or Project CETI for short, was born. (The acronym is pronounced “setti,” and is intentionally reminiscent of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, most technologically sophisticated, and most well-funded effort ever undertaken to communicate with other species.
“I think this is something that people are really excited about: Can you go from science fiction to science?” Russ told me. “So you can talk to whales?”
Sperm whales are nomads. It is estimated that one whale swims at least 20,000 miles in a year. However, there are some locations throughout the tropics that whales tend to prefer, perhaps for reasons related to squid. One of these is the waters off the coast of Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.
CETI has its unofficial headquarters in a rented house above the island’s capital, Roseau.
The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale recording studio. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the coda of passing whales. It also involves implanting recording devices into the whales themselves, cetacean insects so to speak. Data collected in this way can be used to “train” machine learning algorithms.
In July I went to Dominica to watch the CETI team bugging sperm whales. On my first morning on the island, I met Gruber on the docks of a dive shop outside of Roseau. Gruber, 50, is a small man with curly black hair and a cheerful, anxious demeanor. He carried a waterproof case and wore a CETI T-shirt. Soon, several more members of the team appeared, carrying waterproof cases and wearing CETI T-shirts. We boarded an oversized Zodiac called CETI 2 and set off.
The night before, a tropical storm had battered the region with strong winds and heavy rain, and the tops of Dominica’s volcanoes were still shrouded in clouds. The sea was a series of white-edged swells. CETI 2 went at breakneck speed, thumping up and down. Occasionally, flying fish would fly by. These stayed in the air for so long that I was convinced for a moment that they were birds.
About two miles offshore, Captain Kevin George shut down the engine. A graduate student named Yari Mevolak put on headphones and lowered an underwater microphone (hydrophone) into the waves. She listened for a moment, then smiled and handed me the headphones.
The most famous whale sound is the long, plaintive “song” made by humpback whales. The Sperm Whale coda is neither sad nor musical. Some liken it to the sound of frying bacon, while others liken it to the sound of popcorn popping. That morning, as I listened to music in my headphones, I thought of the horses crawling down the cobblestone streets. Then I changed my mind. The rattling sound was more mechanical, as if someone was jotting notes on a manual typewriter somewhere beneath the waves.
Mevorak removed the headphones from the microphone and plugged them into a device that resembled a car speaker mounted on a broomstick. The device, I later learned, had been assembled by the jury out of metal salad bowls and other materials and was designed to locate beaked whales. After twisting it underwater for a while, Mevolak determined the clicks were coming from the southwest. We trudged in that direction, and soon George yelled, “Blow!”
A few hundred yards in front of us was a gray ridge that looked like a misshapen log. (When the whale rests on the surface, only a small part of its massive body is visible.) When the whale blew again, a geyser-like spray of water erupted from the left side of the ridge.
As we approached, the whale blew again. Then it lifted its graceful curved fluke into the air and flew. I was told that it was unlikely that I would resurface for nearly an hour.
We set off in search of our companion. The further south you go, the higher the swells get. At one point I felt my stomach lurch and went over to the side of the boat to surf. “I like to just throw up and get back to work,” Mevolak told me.
Trying to attach a recording device to a sperm whale is a bit like trying to joust while racing a jet ski. The exercise requires attaching a device to the animal’s back using a 30-foot-tall pole and requires getting within 30 feet of the animal, which is about the size of a school bus. Several more whales were spotted that day. But even though we moved around wildly, CETI 2 was never able to get close enough to remove the tagging pole.
The next day the sea was calm. The whale was spotted again and the boat’s pole handler, Oder Haave, made several attempts to tag it. All his efforts were in vain. Either the whale pigeon-holed it at the last minute, or the recording device slipped off the whale’s back and had to be fished out of the water. (The device was about a foot long, shaped like a surfboard, and was supposed to be attached with suction cups.) With each new sighting, the mood at CETI 2 grew. With each new failure, it sank in.
From an essay originally published in The New Yorker on September 11, 2023 and included in Life on a Little-Known Planet by Elizabeth Colbert. Copyright © 2025 Elizabeth Colbert. Published in the United States by Crown, a publishing company of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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elizabeth colbert
About Elizabeth Colbert
Elizabeth Colbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of several books, including Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World.
