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WHALE TALK - decoding of their language
Start date: Nov 27, 2014, End date: May 26, 2017 PROJECT  FINISHED 

Orcas are intelligent and highly vocal. In many cultures legends exist of people blessed with a gift to communicate with them. Who wouldn’t be keen to be able to understand them?Over the past years the dolphinarium industries in Russia and China are blooming. They demand hundreds of orcas from already endangered stocks. At the same time Canadian orcas are loosing their previously abundant prey fish, due to virus epidemics spreading from fish farms. Their rip bones become visible, revealing the decline of their needed body fats. Even their reproduction rate halted. Such developments remain almost untold in public, while politicians declare no reason to be concerned.Reason enough for scientists from France, Russia, and Switzerland to team up with computer linguists in Germany. Officially their research targets at “decoding the language of orcas”. They conduct a pre-trial with google-like technologies, provided by the German computer linguists. The software begins to compare zillions of whale calls at unprecedented speed. Then begins to detect smallest reappearing patterns, even shows how they are connected to each other, similar to syllables and words in a human language. Yet even this is a break-through already, missing is the information about the possible meaning behind these calls. To find out, they set out on small expeditions, to follow wild orcas with the new software on board. Using also remote technologies they film behaviour where before no camera could follow. Step by step they start to understand “when” the orcas communicate with “which” sounds, which is the key to decode any language. Touching moments, even for scientists. At the same time they collected strong evidences, showing the ongoing destruction of habitat and communities. In countries where whales and marine life is little else than a tradable commodity, can their break through discoveries create a new support for the whales, before it is too late? Breaking into new dimensions - WHALE TALK
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