CetaNauts . org
This is a record of that work — who did it, what they found, and the one variable none of it has tested yet.
It is easy to assume that talking to another species is a thing people only imagine. It isn't. It is an active research field with a seventy-year publication record, and right now it has the attention of one of the largest AI laboratories on earth.
Every entry below is real, published, and externally cited. Follow the links.
In 1947, Arthur McBride watched dolphins evade invisible nets at night—offering the first real evidence of biological sonar in marine mammals.
John C. Lilly begins systematic dolphin cognition research, the first sustained scientific program treating dolphins as intelligent communicators.
John Lilly publishes 'Man and Dolphin'—a bestseller that introduces millions to the revolutionary idea that dolphins might be as intelligent as humans, forever changing public perception of cetaceans.
Denise Herzing founds the Wild Dolphin Project, beginning long-term underwater observation of free-ranging Atlantic spotted dolphins (Stenella frontalis) on the Little Bahama Bank. The project — still operating decades later — becomes the longest continuous underwater dolphin research program in the world, accumulating the multi-decade behavioral and acoustic dataset that later trains AI models including Google's DolphinGemma. Direct bridge from Lilly-era captive cognition research to the modern AI-mediated wild-cetacean-communication paradigm.
Laela Sayigh, Peter Tyack, Randall Wells and colleagues publish 'Signature whistles of free-ranging bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus): stability and mother-offspring comparisons' in *Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology* 26:247-260 (1990). Working with the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program's multi-decade individually-known population, they prove signature whistles are stable across years and decades, and that calves modify maternal whistles into their own distinct signatures.
Dr. Thad Starner of Georgia Tech's College of Computing begins collaborating with Dr. Denise Herzing of the Wild Dolphin Project, building CHAT (Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry) — a wearable underwater computer for two-way human-dolphin communication. Two hydrophones covering the full dolphin range to ~200 kHz, an underwater speaker, and pattern recognition to detect when a dolphin mimics a synthetic whistle. The method is deliberately NOT decoding: artificial whistles outside the natural repertoire are assigned to objects the dolphins already value.
Herzing, Delfour and Pack publish 'Responses of Human-habituated wild Atlantic spotted dolphins to play behaviors using a Two-Way Interface' in the International Journal of Comparative Psychology — the first peer-reviewed field results from a two-way human-dolphin interface. Wild, free-swimming subjects; no captivity, no coercion; the dolphins participate only if they choose to stay.
Neil Zeghidour, Alejandro Luebs, Ahmed Omran, Jan Skoglund and Marco Tagliasacchi (Google Research) publish 'SoundStream: An End-to-End Neural Audio Codec' (arXiv:2107.03312). The architecture uses an end-to-end convolutional encoder-decoder with residual vector quantization to compress audio at bitrates 3-12 kbps with quality matching or exceeding traditional codecs, while running in real time on a smartphone CPU. SoundStream is foundational for subsequent audio LLMs, including Google's DolphinGemma — which uses SoundStream-style tokenization to convert dolphin acoustic data into a sequence-modelable token stream.
July 8 2023 (published April 2026): Project CETI captures the first complete drone + hydrophone record of a sperm whale birth in Unit A, a well-studied Dominica matriline. Ten females (grandmothers, mothers, sisters) + one subadult male named Alan attended the birth of a ~1,000-pound calf to a female named Rounder. Six hours of collaborative lifting at the surface before the calf's fluke unfolded enough to swim. The behavior — phylogenetically traceable back ~35 million years — provides quantitative evidence of what Gruber calls 'one of the most collaborative and empathetic entries into the world that we've ever seen, maybe beyond a human.' A pod of pilot whales (documented antagonists of sperm whales) was visible in the upper-right of the drone footage during the event.
Project CETI discovers sperm whale communication has combinatorial structure like human language.
Google releases DolphinGemma — a ~400M parameter AI model trained on 40 years of Wild Dolphin Project recordings (Dr. Denise Herzing, Atlantic spotted dolphins, Bahamas). Uses SoundStream tokenization to convert dolphin vocalizations into discrete tokens. Can predict what a dolphin will vocalize next in a sequence. CHAT system (Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry) uses Pixel phones underwater for real-time AI analysis. Herzing named TIME100 AI 2025. Planned open-source release.
Semenzin, Mustun, Dessi, Orhan, Emanuelli, Lakretz, de Polavieja and Sumbre publish Dolph2Vec (arXiv 2606.12503), applying wav2vec-style self-supervised learning to a new corpus of bottlenose vocalizations. The dataset is the notable part: recorded in a natural marine enclosure in the Red Sea where a resident pod of Tursiops truncatus ponticus lives alongside human caregivers and visitors — semi-captive, but ecologically valid. Representation learning only; no vocabulary training and no two-way interface.
Almost nobody serious is trying to decode dolphin language.
The approach that has carried this field since the 1980s is close to the opposite. Researchers invent whistles — sounds deliberately built to sit outside anything the animals already say, so a match can never be coincidence — and attach them to things the dolphins genuinely want. Then they wait to see whether a dolphin chooses to use one.
Denise Herzing, who has run this experiment longer than anyone alive, puts it plainly: CHAT is an interface, not a translator.
It is a patient, modest, honest experiment. It has been running in open water since 2011, and the hardware behind it was built at Georgia Tech.
Every result on that timeline comes from wild, free-swimming dolphins.
That design has a real strength. Participation is unambiguous, because nothing compels it. A wild dolphin has food, family, and an entire ocean. Whatever interest it shows is genuine.
And it owes a human nothing.
A wild dolphin has an ocean full of problems worth solving. A human's invented word for a scarf is not one of them.
Here is what makes that worth asking about: the studies that did record dolphins using artificial signals to request things — Diana Reiss's underwater keyboards in the 1980s, Louis Herman's language work — were done with animals in human care. Animals that had a relationship with the people asking.
The question this organisation exists to ask is whether motivation, rather than method, is the thing standing in the way.
CetaNauts.org is a small independent research effort based in Georgia. We are not affiliated with any of the programs described above. We think their work is the most interesting science almost nobody is watching.
We have not run an animal trial. We do not have a result. Anything we learn will be published whether or not it supports what we expected.
Any work with animals requires appropriate institutional, legal and welfare review, and would be done only with qualified partners who hold the necessary authorisations. We will say so plainly on this site at every stage.