Whales and Their Surprising Way to Communicate with Us

Picture yourself on a boat, a humpback whale rising close enough to touch the air you’re breathing. Now picture that whale blowing bubble rings six to ten feet wide, rising through the water like an offering. This is not folklore — it is exactly what scientists from the SETI Institute documented between 2019 and 2023. The rings move like smoke but are made entirely of water, and something in the body recognizes them before the mind can explain why.

Whales and Their Bubble Rings

What makes this remarkable is what the whales were not doing. They were not hunting. They were not courting a mate. They were calm, unhurried, and — by every appearance — reaching toward the humans nearby with something like curiosity, something like play. In nine of twelve recorded encounters, the whales circled the boats themselves, drawn to the people watching them as much as the people were drawn to the whales.

Researchers believe these rings may be a form of nonhuman intelligence reaching across the water toward us. Just as we reach for words or a raised hand, the whale may be reaching for a bubble ring — its own way of saying I see you. This matters because it confirms something our elders never doubted: that other beings on this earth carry their own languages, their own ways of extending welcome, and they may have been trying to speak to us long before we thought to listen. Scientists have traced this same intentionality in mycorrhizal forest networks, where trees signal to each other and share what they have — intelligence is woven through the whole fabric of living things, not fenced off inside the human skull.

By studying these behaviors, scientists hope to understand more fully how whales think and move through their world — and in doing so, to widen the aperture of what we search for beyond it. If a creature this size, this ancient, can reach toward us with creativity and care, then perhaps whatever intelligence waits among the stars will reach in ways just as unexpected. Understanding the whale may be training for understanding anything we have not yet learned to recognize.

So the next time you stand at the edge of the ocean, watch for the rings rising through the water. You may be witnessing something older than any of our theories about intelligence — a greeting extended across the boundary of species, waiting only to be received.

Importance of the Discovery

This discovery matters for more than one reason. First, and most plainly, it confirms that nonhuman intelligence is not a distant hypothesis — it lives here, in our own oceans, close enough to touch. We have long assumed intelligence was a human inheritance alone. The humpback whale, blowing a ring of water toward a stranger’s boat, quietly corrects us.

Second, it opens a doorway into cross-species communication that our tradition has always known was there. Just as people carry different tongues and gestures, whales may carry bubble rings as their own vocabulary — an attempt at connection across a divide we assumed was uncrossable. Learning to read these signals could reshape how we relate to every other species sharing this planet with us.

Third, it sharpens our eyes for the search beyond this planet. Scientists are always scanning the sky for signs of life elsewhere, and learning how whales communicate through creative, unexpected means may teach us what to look for. An alien civilization, should one ever announce itself, may not speak in the tidy signals we expect — it may speak the way the whale does, in forms we have to learn to recognize as language at all.

This discovery also carries an obligation: to protect the oceans and every being who calls them home. The humpback whale and its bubble rings remind us how much remains unknown, how much is still waiting to be understood if we protect the space for it to reveal itself. The way whales use sound to travel across vast distances of open water echoes what research on music, ritual, and the neuroscience of belonging has already shown us — that resonance, in whatever form it takes, is one of the oldest ways any living thing has of saying I am still here, and I am reaching for you.

This discovery is a real step forward in how we understand nonhuman intelligence and the possibility of speaking across species. The humpback whale is not simply a large body moving through water — it is an intelligent being with its own way of reaching toward the world. And in learning to recognize that reaching, we may be preparing ourselves to recognize it again, someday, reaching back from somewhere far beyond our own shore.

Connecting Whales to Space Research

Researchers studying these bubble rings believe the whale has something to teach us about searching for life beyond our own world. If a creature this ancient can find creative ways to reach across a divide, why would we assume any intelligence among the stars would announce itself more simply? Scientists at the SETI Institute — whose whole work is listening for signals from beyond — believe that understanding the whale’s bubble rings could sharpen how we recognize signs of life we don’t yet know how to name.

Whales use these bubbles to speak with each other, and it seems, with us. Learning to recognize these signals may train us to notice the unusual signals arriving from far beyond this planet. Just as a whale might rise a ring of water to say hello, whatever intelligence waits elsewhere may reach for us in a form just as unexpected.

This is the work of the “WhaleSETI” program. Scientists worked with humpback whales — among them, one named Twain — to see whether a real back-and-forth conversation could be built between species. The whale responded, and responded in ways that looked genuinely intelligent, genuinely meaningful. Researchers are studying these exchanges for patterns that may guide how we one day recognize a conversation with something even further from home.

What we learn from the whale may even refine Drake’s Equation — the formula scientists use to estimate how many civilizations beyond Earth we might ever be able to reach. If intelligent beings can communicate through play, through creativity, through gestures as unassuming as a ring of water, that possibility deserves a place in how we calculate what to expect from a message arriving from somewhere else entirely.

In the end, watching how the humpback whale uses its bubble rings does two things at once: it deepens our understanding of the intelligence already sharing this earth with us, and it prepares us for what we might need to recognize should intelligence ever answer us from somewhere else. Marine biology and the search for life among the stars, it turns out, are asking the same question in different water.

Impact on Scientific Equations

One place this discovery lands is Drake’s Equation itself — the formula scientists use to estimate how many intelligent civilizations might exist across the universe. Studying how the humpback whale uses its bubble rings gives researchers a living example of how another intelligence — one not our own — might choose to send a signal.

If whales reach toward us through play and creativity rather than a plain, simple signal, perhaps any intelligence out there does the same. The bubble ring suggests intelligence doesn’t always announce itself efficiently — sometimes it announces itself with delight. That possibility alone should soften how tightly we define what a meaningful signal from space is allowed to look like.

Scientists also study how whales relate to each other and to the wider ocean around them, looking for clues about how intelligence might organize itself elsewhere. If whales have built their own particular ways of speaking — to each other, and now it seems, to us — then whatever intelligence exists beyond Earth likely has its own particular ways too. What we learn here becomes a sharper instrument for what we search for out there.

By paying close attention to the whale and the ring it offers, we come to know more about the intelligence already living alongside us — and in the same motion, we sharpen our capacity to recognize intelligence we have not yet met. Marine biology and the search for life beyond this planet are, in this moment, walking the same shoreline.

What We Can Learn

When we look closely at how humpback whales use their bubble rings, we find that intelligence and communication take more shapes than we ever gave them credit for. This teaches us something our ancestors already understood: nonhuman intelligence surrounds us, and it rarely looks the way we expect it to. The whale, blowing its ring of water, is proof that other beings have their own ways of meeting the world.

The first lesson is this: intelligence was never ours alone to claim. Humpback whales show creativity and sociability, using bubble rings to speak to one another and, it seems, to us. This challenges the narrow definitions we’ve built around what counts as intelligent, and returns us to something Ubuntu has always held — that we share this world with other minds, other forms of awareness, deserving of the same reverence we ask for ourselves. For a wider look at this frontier, new insights into animal consciousness trace this same thread — from the complexity of whale culture to the surprising inner lives of species we once assumed were empty of awareness.

The second lesson is cross-species communication itself. Just as we use words, faces, and the language of our hands, the whale may use a ring of water rising through the sea. If we want to speak with other intelligent beings — whether they live in our oceans or somewhere far beyond our sky — we will need to stay open to forms of expression that don’t resemble our own. What we learn from the whale becomes practice for whatever conversation may come next, from wherever it arrives.

Studying the whale also returns us to an old responsibility: protecting the ocean that carries it. Preserving these waters means we remain able to learn from these beings for generations still to come. Protecting the whale and its home is not charity extended downward — it is reciprocity, care returned for all that the ocean has given us.

Ultimately, these findings ask us to take play seriously as a sign of intelligence. A whale rising a bubble ring toward a boat may be saying hello, or simply delighting in its own existence — and either reading teaches us that intelligent beings, whale or otherwise, may reach for connection through joy as readily as through purpose. In the end, studying how the humpback whale uses its bubble rings gives us a window into the remarkable intelligence already sharing this planet with us — knowledge that may one day help us recognize kinship in forms we have not yet imagined, on this earth or far beyond it.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-curious-humpback-whales-approach-humans.html

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1086532

https://www.science.org/content/article/humpback-whale-songs-are-structured-human-language

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