Sperm Whale Birth Caught on Camera Reveals a Society Built on Trust
One sunny day in July started like most field days for the Project Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI) team off the coast of Dominica. With their hydrophones in the water and drones charged and ready, the same sperm whale families they had been tracking for years swam somewhere below the surface. Then Unit A, all eleven members of the family group, came up together and started acting strange. Typically, whales spread out to forage, so researchers knew immediately that something was happening.
What the team witnessed and captured on drone footage that morning, in partnership with the National Geographic Society, became the most comprehensive documentation of a sperm whale birth ever recorded, and the first scientific evidence that animals other than primates actively cooperate to assist during birth.
The calf’s mother was a 19-year-old sperm whale named Rounder that researchers had been following since 2005. She was in labor, and the rest of her unit knew it.
The team’s two DJI Mavic 3 drones hovering above the Caribbean’s surface captured what happened next: several other females, relatives and non-relatives alike, closed in around Rounder and physically supported her through a 34-minute delivery. [1]
Sperm whale calves are born tail-first to prevent drowning. The newborn cannot swim immediately, so the first minutes of life are critical. Within one minute of delivery, the adult females lifted the calf to the surface on their heads and backs so it could take its first breath. For hours afterward, pairs of whales continued holding the baby above the water until it found its bearings. [2]
A Community Organized Around Its Most Vulnerable Moment
On any other day, the two-family lines within Unit A keep to themselves. The Lady Oracle line and the Fruit Salad line travel together but maintain their distance. When Rounder went into labor, none of that mattered. Every whale closed in. [3]
Related and unrelated females took turns supporting the mother and calf. The researchers used machine learning software to track each whale’s position and movement throughout the birth, building a detailed record of who did what and when. The level of coordination they found is nearly without parallel in the marine mammal world.
“The group quite literally helps bring the calf into the world,” said Mauricio Cantor, a behavioral ecologist at Oregon State University who reviewed the research. The findings were published on March 26, 2026, in two companion papers in the journals Science and Scientific Reports. [4]
The team’s phylogenetic analysis suggests this is not a recent adaptation. Communal birth support in sperm whales may predate the most recent common ancestor of all toothed whales, dating back to more than 36 million years ago. [4]
What the Whales Were Saying During the Birth
The whales were not silent. Throughout the birth, the team recorded their vocalizations, and something was shifting in the sounds at key moments.
Sperm whales communicate in rapid bursts of clicks called codas. During the birth, the pattern of those clicks changed: sequences slowed, lengthened, and at certain moments produced sounds acousticians describe as vowel-like, something resembling an “A” and an “I.” The sounds carried hundreds of feet through the water and may have been how the group stayed coordinated through the delivery. [2]
For Project CETI, those sounds are exactly what the whole operation is built around.
Project CETI’s Mission to Decode Sperm Whale Communication
Project CETI is one of the most ambitious interspecies science projects ever attempted. Founded in 2020 by National Geographic Explorer David Gruber, CETI has brought together over 50 scientists from more than a dozen institutions across six countries, combining marine biology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, cryptography, and underwater robotics to figure out what sperm whales are saying to each other. [5]
The starting point is the coda. Whales produce these rhythmic click sequences through structures in their nasal passages called phonic lips. CETI has spent years recording thousands of codas from sperm whale families in the Eastern Caribbean, building the largest dataset of its kind.
In May 2024, CETI and MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory published a paper in Nature Communications that changed how researchers think about whale clicks. The team fed nearly 9,000 codas recorded between 2005 and 2018 into a machine learning model. What came back was not noise. The clicks had structure. They changed depending on context, the way phonemes do in human speech, and for the first time researchers had enough evidence to propose that sperm whales have something like a phonetic alphabet. [6]
“Our findings indicate the presence of structured information content and also challenge the prevailing belief among many linguists that complex communication is unique to humans,” [6]
Dr. Daniela Rus, Director of MIT CSAIL.
A follow-up study published in November 2025 in the journal Open Mind, led by CETI and the University of California, Berkeley, added another layer. Sperm whale codas, the team found, also modulate click frequency in patterns that map onto human vowels and diphthongs. Two discrete patterns showed up consistently across individual whales: what researchers are calling the a-coda vowel and the i-coda vowel. The whales exchange them in what appears to be structured conversation. [7]
“What’s interesting from a linguistics standpoint is the resemblance to human vowel systems,” said Gašper Beguš, CETI’s linguistics lead. “The presence of consistent vowel and diphthong-like patterns points to a level of phonetic complexity previously thought to be unique to humans.” [7]
To capture all of this, CETI developed bio-loggers. These small recording devices attach directly to the whales and collect high-fidelity audio alongside depth, movement, and orientation data during deep dives. The hardware and software are open source and designed for use by marine researchers anywhere. [5]
Why a Sperm Whale Birth Changes How We Think About the Ocean
Shane Gero has been following Rounder since she was a nursing calf. He was on the boat that July morning when she gave birth. He has spent two decades recording the clicks and codas of her family, building the kind of long-term behavioral record that most wildlife research never gets the chance to accumulate. Without it, the birth footage would have been remarkable but uninterpretable. Because of it, the team could identify every whale in the frame, understand their relationships, and place what they saw in 20 years of context. [3]
Beneath the surface of the ocean, sperm whales are living complex social lives, coordinating, communicating, and showing up for each other in ways that scientists are only beginning to document. A team on a sailboat off Dominica is working to understand what they are saying and I think it is something well worth sharing.
Sources
[1] Laura Baisas, “Baby sperm whale birth captured in groundbreaking video,” Popular Science, March 2026. https://www.popsci.com/environment/sperm-whale-birth-video/
[2] Marc Fawcett-Atkinson, “A rare sperm whale birth is reshaping how scientists understand animal cooperation,” Canada’s National Observer, April 2, 2026. https://www.nationalobserver.com/2026/04/02/news/sperm-whale-cooperation-research
[3] Project CETI, “Studies documenting rare sperm whale birth and ancient cooperative care released,” EurekAlert, March 26, 2026. https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1120823
[4] “Scientists listen in on sperm whale communication with new tech,” Oceanographic Magazine, December 2025. https://oceanographicmagazine.com/news/scientists-listen-in-on-sperm-whale-communication-with-new-tech/
[5] Rachel Gordon, “Exploring the mysterious alphabet of sperm whales,” MIT News, May 7, 2024. https://news.mit.edu/2024/csail-ceti-explores-sperm-whale-alphabet-0507
[5a] Pratyusha Sharma et al., “Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations,” Nature Communications, May 7, 2024. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47221-8
[6] Project CETI, “Scientists Discover Vowel and Diphthong-like Patterns in Sperm Whale Communication,” PRNewswire, November 12, 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/scientists-discover-vowel–and-diphthong-like-patterns-in-sperm-whale-communication-302612877.html
[7] Natasha Daly, “Scientists recorded a sperm whale birth up close for the first time,” National Geographic, March 2026. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/sperm-whale-birth-video
[8] Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, “Studies Documenting Rare Sperm Whale Birth and Ancient Cooperative Care Released,” March 2026. https://seas.harvard.edu/news/studies-documenting-rare-sperm-whale-birth-and-ancient-cooperative-care-released
[9] Project CETI, “Sperm Whale Phonetic Alphabet Proposed for the First Time,” May 7, 2024. https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/sperm-whale-phonetic-alphabet-proposed-for-the-first-time
