re: Scientists believe they have discovered the analog of vowels in whale language.

They must not have been observing whales in the Balkans.

The Whale Whisperers

Brian Regan does a funny bit about this.

Brian Regan - Whale Noises

Sperm Whales are fascinating creatures diving to depths as deep as 10,000 feet to hunt and eat their favorite food, giant squid. In pitch black darkness they use sonar to locate and catch them.

Scanned the paper and similar to so many academic publications, its conclusions are in search of additional funding for more research; boat time is expensive.

That whale sonar "clicks" have properties of acoustic focused FSK modulation isn't new, but seems so to these biologists and linguistic scientists.

Send the data set with acquisition parameters to the Naval Research Lab and they'll give you a better answer in a few days. MIT can do this as well, among others.

They also make simple editing mistakes, as I doubt this statement is intentional.

"The hearing ability of sperm whales is strong in the frequency range where we observe the patterns, and it can exceed 30 kHz (Schmidt et al., 2018). The difference is perceptible even to human listeners."

The upper limit of a teenager's hearing is around 20khz, rarely to 28khz, degrading with age by your fifties to around 12khz.

And," it is likely that these properties get distorted at distance, but the effects of distance are currently difficult to estimate." No, otherwise the techniques used in ocean exploration geophysics and military submarine sonars would not be possible.

We've long known that whales communicate in complex sonar terms. Correlating that with observed behavior is the ultimate unknown.

Ocean Acoustic Physics Nerd button ON [OFF]



As ny Brit colleagues are fond of saying, this paper is new money for old rope.

Your Brit friends should have published first then.