The answer is maybe, but first researchers have to collect and analyze an unprecedented number of sperm whale communications, researchers told Live Science.

In fact, "The complexity and duration of whale vocalizations suggest that they are at least in principle capable of exhibiting a more complex grammar" than other nonhuman animals, according to an April 2021 paper about sperm whales posted to the preprint server arXiv.org. .

This paper, by a cross-disciplinary project known as CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), outlines a plan to decode sperm whale vocalizations, first by collecting recordings of sperm whales, and then by using machine learning to try to decode the sequences of clicks these fellow mammals use to communicate.

CETI chose to study sperm whales over other whales because their clicks have an almost Morse code-like structure, which artificial intelligence (AI) might have an easier time analyzing.

This same clicking mechanism is also used in their social vocalizations, although the communication clicks are more tightly packed, according to the CETI paper.

Figuring out even this much has been challenging, as sperm whales have "been so hard for humans to study for so many years," David Gruber, a marine biologist and CETI project leader, told Live Science.

Scientists hope these same methods could be applied to the vocalizations of sperm whales, she said?

The CETI project currently has recordings of about 100,000 sperm whale clicks, painstakingly gathered by marine biologists over many years, but the machine-learning algorithms might need somewhere in the vicinity of 4 billion.

To bridge this gap, CETI is setting up numerous automated channels for collecting recordings from sperm whales.

What's more, sperm whales are known to have dialects, according to a 2016 study in the journal Royal Society Open Science, which analyzed codas from nine sperm whale groups in the Caribbean for six years.

What exactly one sperm whale says to another remains as dark and murky as the waters they swim in, but this mystery makes any answers CETI finds all the more intriguing.