How can we attempt to pull patterns out of the song?
What if the songs actually contain the whale equivalent of GPS coordinates? How would we detect it?
I'm sure a few people have spent many hours trying to do so, but I wonder if machine learning could help. It would be a challenge: we'd need factors to correlate to, like the whale's position or information about their environment (location of boats, pollution, or prey).
Perhaps a start would be triangulating the whale's position during each song, and looking for elements that somehow vary with location. I imagine someone has looked for this. Location might not actually be a good thing to look for - whales can presumably determine each other's location from the sound source and distance alone, like a human could hear the direction and distance of a shouting human. What else might they be communicating?
It seems to me that one would not only have to record the whale but the actions of basically all whales (if this does travel across oceans then studying local whales might miss a lot of data). Then you could do some deep analysis on the correlation of while recordings with actions of the whale population. Of course you could try to just study a pod or local group of whales to try to decipher near range communication, but depending on how often they communicate long range, this might have too much noise.
You could look at ocean currents and surface temperature to see if there's a relationship there. I can imagine whales would be interested in collaborating on a regional biodensity forecast.
This is a good point - it seems not improbably that a whale's view of place would have more to do with their location in an oceanic current rather than their x, y coordinate in a plane. Sort of like if you describe your position within a car on a highway - you most naturally would say "im in the fast lane between shelbyville and springfield" rather than "i'm at lat/lng such-and-such"
So to attempt to find correlations with the whale's absolute position may (who knows!?) be looking for a signal the whale isn't sending.
Ocean currents and swells are also how ancient Polynesians navigated the ocean so precisely over such huge distances. They developed the ability to read them like maps. Unfortunately, these skills are almost totally extinct. I believe there's only one Hawaiian "master navigator" in the old ways left alive. That intelligent animals could also survive by using this information is not at all unbelievable. Very cool and interesting to think about.
What if the songs actually contain the whale equivalent of GPS coordinates? How would we detect it?
I'm sure a few people have spent many hours trying to do so, but I wonder if machine learning could help. It would be a challenge: we'd need factors to correlate to, like the whale's position or information about their environment (location of boats, pollution, or prey).
Perhaps a start would be triangulating the whale's position during each song, and looking for elements that somehow vary with location. I imagine someone has looked for this. Location might not actually be a good thing to look for - whales can presumably determine each other's location from the sound source and distance alone, like a human could hear the direction and distance of a shouting human. What else might they be communicating?