“I think for your speed argument to be relevant, you need to show that the whales are switching between sounds at a biologically implausible speed”. Yes, this is exactly right. Look at Fig 6 above.
The spectral pattern switches from “a” clicks to “i” clicks in at most 100 ms (there might be 30 ms between clicks and each of those click samples is 5 ms). That’s really fast. It rivals the human motor system governing our articulation. It’s ambitious to claim whales have such capabilities without detailed anatomical references that the authors don’t make.
Figure 6 doesn’t have any timing information (about the gaps between the clicks)? It just has the spectral analysis of five different clicks (which presumably form a coda). When I looked up another paper to try to figure out what codas are, it suggested that 1s is a reasonable estimate for total time, with switching happening in about 200ms, which seems plausible to me.
I think a single implausible hop should be enough to persuade me that something else is going on?
I do have some lingering confusion about whether you’re trying to establish that there’s a recording problem and the whales aren’t making the sounds that are being analyzed, or whether the whales are making the sounds but it’s somehow unintentional.
“I think for your speed argument to be relevant, you need to show that the whales are switching between sounds at a biologically implausible speed”. Yes, this is exactly right. Look at Fig 6 above.
The spectral pattern switches from “a” clicks to “i” clicks in at most 100 ms (there might be 30 ms between clicks and each of those click samples is 5 ms). That’s really fast. It rivals the human motor system governing our articulation. It’s ambitious to claim whales have such capabilities without detailed anatomical references that the authors don’t make.
Figure 6 doesn’t have any timing information (about the gaps between the clicks)? It just has the spectral analysis of five different clicks (which presumably form a coda). When I looked up another paper to try to figure out what codas are, it suggested that 1s is a reasonable estimate for total time, with switching happening in about 200ms, which seems plausible to me.
Or you’d be persuaded if they switched “a” to “i” back to “a” in biologically implausible time?
I think a single implausible hop should be enough to persuade me that something else is going on?
I do have some lingering confusion about whether you’re trying to establish that there’s a recording problem and the whales aren’t making the sounds that are being analyzed, or whether the whales are making the sounds but it’s somehow unintentional.
I’d lean toward the latter, but I just don’t think we know.