from the populace far right alternative for germany in a regional election. the vote in the eastern stage of saxony and how it is seen as the last big test of public opinion before a general and actually have temporary use. you're watching the news life from britain. we take a dive into the depths of the ocean with doc film next, where biologists are trying to decipher the language of orca whales. and i'll be back with more news at the top of the hours for me in the rest of the team here in berlin. take care and caesar, the but you, i know people i learned america exposing injustice,

global news that matters. d. w. me for mines. oh, i hear off canada pacific coast researchers are hoping to make a long held dream come true. behavioral biologists and i t experts have teamed up to create programs aimed at deciphering acoustic signal from animals. could artificial intelligence help to identify patterns in the sound made by marine mammals where we soon start to understand what it is that whales are talking about the

the coastal waters between alaska in the us and canada and vancouver island are where a group of killer whales or orchids, spend their summers a team of scientists from the deep our research expedition our preparing to embark deep our stands for deep learning applied to animal linguistics. i was a computer scientist, m a news from germany's university of atlanta and has spent years working on automatic recognition for human speech patterns. can the same methods be adapted to animal languages? underwater microphones, embedded in tubes, serve at the expedition, ears for 3 summers. teams of computer scientists and biologists have set out to record org calls and document whale behavior. rachel cheng from the life nets

institute for zoo and wildlife research in berlin is looking for patterns between behavior and animal vocalizations that could help to decipher whale language. i assume they would have a very different system which fits into our language. around $300.00 or cars are identified as northern residence, as they spend each summer along the coast of alaska and northern british columbia. they live in small family groups and are very communicative to different families use different dialects. and is it possible to discern the meaning of individual calls? i hear the researchers lower the highly sensitive microphones into the water.

the 8 hydro phones can record sounds up to a frequency of 100 killer hurts that's far higher pitched than what is audible to the human ear. thanks to the network of hydrophone and acoustic triangulation, the researchers will later be able to calculate the positions of the whales to avoid disturbing the whales with engine noise. the research trying around is equipped with an electric motor. while visibility is limited under water, sound waves are transmitted over considerable distances. that's why a communication system with loud calls is clearly beneficial. they're very tied together and frequent direction chain circling, body twisting, plus love, co location over there, socializing lighting us up into rob,

and frequent twisting and jump and jump on to each other. that sounds like they talk about the plan. what are we going to do next? or cause only spend about 5 percent of their time at the surface, which makes systematic observation quite difficult. the research team uses drones to document the behavior of the animals diving expeditions with whales are prohibited in canada. the scientists are looking for the smallest meaningful units of communication which whale is calling, and which one answers, or some sounds repeated more than others. biologists, alexander hall, examines the recordings. each call comprises a series of brief promises which sound like melodic curves to human ears.

each shift in sound could be meaningful while recording the whale calls. the researchers also document the behavior of the animals the for individuals in this group here that are circling, there were 4 back there with the male. there's one that i can see in the corner of my coming towards it. and the mom and cas $81011.00 individuals minimum. the more data available, the easier it is to train deep learning programs to decipher away language. it's therefore a major advantage for the researchers that over 20000 hours of orca curls have already been collected more than for any other animal species. the whale researcher jared towers has been tasked by the canadian government with

observing different oracle populations. back in the 1900 seventy's scientists here began documenting individual animals as well as their group structures. anyone always trade off? i had the towers has no problem telling the or because apart the scratch here on i want a want to wait persisted for least a couple years. so the, the way that we identify the individuals, no matter what population they belong to, is by appearance, and you're looking for a certain features on an individual killer out. the door softens and the patches around the fin have different shapes, enabling scientists to catalog each of the northern residents. every family forms

a lifelong bond. what we're looking at with all of these family as an adult female leaving the group and the fathers of their offspring don't play much of a role in family group. jared towers works for a federal institution that safeguards canada waters is former boss, john ford. with the 1st to distinguish between the disparate calls of the whales. ford's research revolutionized our understanding of the communication system used by the resident archive we're listening to or calls in a class wheels. that's the exciting

part of underwater listening as you're getting a window into their, into their life that you would never, you would never see. john for discovered that the whales used about 50 different called different families, prefer different types of calls. these were nicknamed dialect and used to help identify individual families. when they're missing the various stereotype signals, it's simply to keep in touch with everybody in the group name exchange them. they're constantly monitoring each other's location because they can tell where they are. because of their very directional hearing, and they can monitor the sort of behavioral state, the excitement level, the arousal state of all the other animals in the kindred. northern resident orca visit, pebble beaches daily. we can hear them rubbing right now. they're making

socializing sounds and you can hear the pebbles getting out and they just love all sides of the body just under the, in the cell part of the being only a few orca groups worldwide engage in this sort of body rob. this behavior is not genetic, rather it's a tradition passed on within families of the northern residents, just like their language. me back on the german canadian research boat. it's a challenge to locate each family among the $300.00 individuals that make up the northern resident population. the orchids are constantly on the move in an expensive water. this size of belgium, the expedition coverson area from vancouver island to the southern tip of alaska. the eagles indicated where schools of famine might be. and this is where orchids

often hunt to the calls from the club can be heard on the underwater microphones. the team tries to determine the position of the whale that comes from the left. that comes from the right. they compare the calls with a catalogue compiled by john ford, but they encounter discrepancies. and it looks quite the calls of class and 9 are used by different whale families from the calls from the same class should be almost identical. but these differ in length, melody and harmonics. human analysis so far has amounted to only a rough classification. looking at the specter grams, i'm very sure that we can, you know, achieve something that rival the human performance to well families approach. what

calls are they exchanging through cor, this after a hear the call back and then thought at the front turn around, the researchers are interested in which group calling which one the answers and which sounds they're using so look here that i for pushing abode and you can hear back on well, yes, this is in 23. so there's a lot of variations also. an interesting they, here's a 23 families course, or is it different?

yes. is how people differentiate different. if you have a lot of quotes inside to try and testify, the programmers use algorithms or classifiers to automatically analyze millions of whale calls in order to compare recurring sound patterns with recurring behavioral patterns. same method is used to decipher the meaning of individual words in foreign languages. for emma newt and his team, it's no easy feat to automatically filter out the week orca calls from the constantly fluctuating noise of the ocean by matching thousands of calls on the input side with a target value on the output side. they train neural networks. these layers of neural networks then learn bit by bit which sounds are typical for

the purple peaks indicate a high probability of having found a whale call. it's the 1st time and machine has been trained to automatically detect orca sounds. still clustering calls into similar sound groups remains a big challenge. when comparing tens of thousands of recordings always calls are sorted by what they have in common. but the cluster is still too crude to form reliable classes. further programming is required. the team suspects that the northern resident or cause have a complex language system and made and process more intricate sound patterns than humans. but how much is even known about the acoustic capacity of their brains?

this is telegraph cove on vancouver island where l minute and rachel chang have an appointment. only a handful of researchers worldwide have expertise on whale and dolphin brains. neuroscientist laurie moreno is one of them. is kathleen, this is an orca scar, a cranium bright opened worker. and in the front you find the melon where they do be good. they directly at the location and this part right here, this large part is where the break with that. yeah. yeah. human and whale brains generally share the same the mainly an architecture. both supreme court sees are wrinkled and complex, but the orca brain is 5 times bigger among the largest of any animal. and unlike.