works the exact same way by sending very distinct tones, millisecond-long tones, through a phone line. These are some more cetacean vocalizations. So I know that sounds insane to many of you.
And from six or five feet away from a whale's eye? Commercial hunting of cetaceans, I should say.
of development of vocal use in dolphins. Now, with cetaceans-- with whales and dolphins-- we have a couple interesting examples where they're not just listening and taking advantage of knowing an alarm call from another species.
There are two research teams currently working on this. One is called Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, which spun out of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and the other is called Earth Species. Now, they're both looking at sperm whales.
And now, all known spawning aggregations of Nassau groupers are protected, including Northeast Point at Glover's Reef, which has a big spawning event in February, March every year. Belize has cetaceans like a number of other countries. This is actually the first dive I ever took at Glover's Reef.
They showed me this completely other side of this activity, which was about the furthest thing away from the competitive side as you can imagine. One of the most interesting things I thought they were working on was echo location and click communication with cetaceans, which are dolphins and whales. Now, let's start a little animation here.
So those are just a few of the things these researchers are trying to figure out right now. They're working with a group of mathematicians and physicists in France, trying to bust this cetacean click communication code. They believe it's not a linguistics problem, but a coding problem.
they say absolutely this is an extremely intelligent animal. Yes, sir. So beyond maternal bonding, which is, I think, pretty common in cetaceans,
For folks that have seen Leatherbacks, theyíre talking 9 feet long, these creatures that are extremely vulnerable, the last, the largest population in the planet lives here and is doing very well. The Bay of Bengal has the worldís largest population of Irrawaddy river dolphins and coastal cetaceans . But the government of Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries on the planet, just put in a protected area to protect a whole slew of the population of river dolphins that is bigger by a factor of ten than any other