Latest news with #Coller-DolittlePrize
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Do these Florida dolphins have a language? Scientists are finding new clues.
Dolphins are some of the most vocal animals in our oceans. Their pods are a bustling soundscape of clicks, whistles, and buzzy pulses. What to our ears is a creaking door or a melodic pop is to a dolphin a means to echolocate or communicate. They even have names—research has found they use 'signature whistles' to identify themselves, a sort of vocal version of a human's signature. These whistles are produced by one individual and repeated by another—'Jeff, Jeff'—to initiate or re-establish contact. The discovery back in 2013 that dolphins imitate each other's whistles showed that these cetaceans can understand and learn these unique sounds—a complex cognitive feat for non-human animals. Now a talkative bunch of wild bottlenose dolphins have revealed another talent: they appear to be using a broad repertoire of whistles that are not names. So far, researchers have identified 22 of these 'non-signature whistles' used by dozens of the dolphins. 'We have these non-signature whistles that seem potentially like they could function like words of some kind, with specific meanings,' says Laela Sayigh, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Sayigh and her team were recently awarded the Coller-Dolittle Prize for Two-way Inter-species Communication. Two of the whistles—with the catchy names NSWA and NSWB—seem to have a common function, one an alarm, the other a query, respectively. The findings, recently published as a preprint on bioRxiv, raise the question of whether dolphins may communicate using something akin to a language. 'If this pans out, it's a very, very big discovery in terms of understanding dolphin communication,' says Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the research. But it's a big stretch at this point to consider these sounds similar to words, he says. 'Non-signature whistles have been of interest to researchers for ages and ages and no one's really got very far working on that. They're the big advantage of this study.' The idea that dolphins may have a language dates back to the 1960s, though any conclusive evidence has remained elusive. Studying communication among an underwater species is difficult to observe and dolphins don't make any recognizably consistent movements linked to their sounds. Yet for over forty years, scientists in the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program have carried out regular health assessments on a six-generation pod of around 170 wild dolphins that live in the waters around Florida's western coastline. As dolphins surfaced for air, researchers were able to record decades of dolphin vocalizations by briefly placing underwater microphones called hydrophones on their heads, as they swam in temporary net corrals. In 2012, the same research team began using digital acoustic tags fitted with suction cups, that ride on the back of the animals as they swim freely. These captured high-quality sounds and movement underwater. The result of this data is a giant catalogue of dolphin chit chat, based on more than 1,000 recording sessions made over the past 40 years. Around 2017, while digging into some of this data, Sayigh noticed a strange whistle with an unusual flat tone in the middle. She was surprised to notice it was then used by another dolphin. 'I kind of thought I was going a little bonkers,' she says. But her team has now found more than 35 of the dolphins using the same signal. Based on the context in which the dolphins make it, the researchers think this whistle—NSWB—could function as some sort of question. In one instance, the researchers were running an experiment using a hydrophone dipped in the surface of the water. When they played the signature whistles of two closely bonded male dolphins as they swam together—they heard the query in return. 'On the boat we were joking that it was the 'WTF' whistle,' says Sayigh. 'It was kind of like, 'what's going on? We're together, but we're hearing us whistling to each other'.' The second most common non-signature whistle, NSWA, has been used by over 25 individual dolphins and is a punchy combination of up-and-down sweeps. During a series of trials using drones to monitor movement, the whistle seemed to cause most dolphins to avoid the source. 'That doesn't absolutely mean it's an alarm type call, but it seems like a reasonable starting point as a hypothesis,' says Sayigh. Jason Bruck, a biologist at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas who was not involved in the study, says that really nailing down what the whistles mean will be a big challenge that will need good behavioral data. 'If the animal swims away from the whistle, did you offend it somehow? Did you play an alarm whistle? Did you whistle something that was so loud it scared them? You have no idea what's going on inside that animal's head.' The research is still in its infancy. But dolphins are life-long learners, appear to use specific names, and females communicate at higher frequencies with their children—like human 'motherese.' The research team in Sarasota thinks this all suggests a wider repertoire of shared sounds that could reflect a starting point for a 'language-like communication system'. 'If there is a species that we might be able to kind of try to engage with in some kind of two way communication, these guys are really good candidates,' says Sayigh. Whether or not the dolphins' communication is 'language-like' depends on how 'language' is defined, says Sara Torres Ortiz, a biologist at the University of Southern Denmark also not involved in the research. If the criteria is referential signaling— specific sounds referring to specific objects or events—this ability has been seen in other animals, including vervet monkeys and prairie dogs. 'Given these precedents, it would not be surprising if dolphins also possess some form of referential communication,' she says. Other animals may even have communication systems that are more effective than the sounds and cues that humans think of as language, says Bruck, including dolphins who collect information about their friends through urine. 'If we take the animals out of our own heads and we take them for what they are, you find that there's a lot of complexity in what they do as it is.'
National Geographic
22-05-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
Do these Florida dolphins have a language? Scientists are finding new clues.
'If there is a species that we might be able to engage with in some kind of two-way communication, these guys are really good candidates.' Bottlenose dolphins living near Sarasota, Florida have been observed making consistently structured whistles that suggest a common meaning. Photograph By "Photo by Brookfield Zoo Chicago's Sarasota Dolphin Research Dolphins are some of the most vocal animals in our oceans. Their pods are a bustling soundscape of clicks, whistles, and buzzy pulses. What to our ears is a creaking door or a melodic pop is to a dolphin a means to echolocate or communicate. They even have names—research has found they use 'signature whistles' to identify themselves, a sort of vocal version of a human's signature. These whistles are produced by one individual and repeated by another—'Jeff, Jeff'—to initiate or re-establish contact. The discovery back in 2013 that dolphins imitate each other's whistles showed that these cetaceans can understand and learn these unique sounds—a complex cognitive feat for non-human animals. Now a talkative bunch of wild bottlenose dolphins have revealed another talent: they appear to be using a broad repertoire of whistles that are not names. So far, researchers have identified 22 of these 'non-signature whistles' used by dozens of the dolphins. 'We have these non-signature whistles that seem potentially like they could function like words of some kind, with specific meanings,' says Laela Sayigh, a marine biologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Hampshire College in Massachusetts. Sayigh and her team were recently awarded the Coller-Dolittle Prize for Two-way Inter-species Communication. Two of the whistles—with the catchy names NSWA and NSWB—seem to have a common function, one an alarm, the other a query, respectively. The findings, recently published as a preprint on bioRxiv, raise the question of whether dolphins may communicate using something akin to a language. 'If this pans out, it's a very, very big discovery in terms of understanding dolphin communication,' says Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the research. But it's a big stretch at this point to consider these sounds similar to words, he says. 'Non-signature whistles have been of interest to researchers for ages and ages and no one's really got very far working on that. They're the big advantage of this study.' From scuba diving to set-jetting Creating a catalogue of dolphin chatter The idea that dolphins may have a language dates back to the 1960s, though any conclusive evidence has remained elusive. Studying communication among an underwater species is difficult to observe and dolphins don't make any recognizably consistent movements linked to their sounds. Yet for over forty years, scientists in the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program have carried out regular health assessments on a six-generation pod of around 170 wild dolphins that live in the waters around Florida's western coastline. As dolphins surfaced for air, researchers were able to record decades of dolphin vocalizations by briefly placing underwater microphones called hydrophones on their heads, as they swam in temporary net corrals. In 2012, the same research team began using digital acoustic tags fitted with suction cups, that ride on the back of the animals as they swim freely. These captured high-quality sounds and movement underwater. The result of this data is a giant catalogue of dolphin chit chat, based on more than 1,000 recording sessions made over the past 40 years. Commonly shared whistles Around 2017, while digging into some of this data, Sayigh noticed a strange whistle with an unusual flat tone in the middle. She was surprised to notice it was then used by another dolphin. 'I kind of thought I was going a little bonkers,' she says. But her team has now found more than 35 of the dolphins using the same signal. Based on the context in which the dolphins make it, the researchers think this whistle—NSWB—could function as some sort of question. In one instance, the researchers were running an experiment using a hydrophone dipped in the surface of the water. When they played the signature whistles of two closely bonded male dolphins as they swam together—they heard the query in return. 'On the boat we were joking that it was the 'WTF' whistle,' says Sayigh. 'It was kind of like, 'what's going on? We're together, but we're hearing us whistling to each other'.' The second most common non-signature whistle, NSWA, has been used by over 25 individual dolphins and is a punchy combination of up-and-down sweeps. During a series of trials using drones to monitor movement, the whistle seemed to cause most dolphins to avoid the source. 'That doesn't absolutely mean it's an alarm type call, but it seems like a reasonable starting point as a hypothesis,' says Sayigh. Jason Bruck, a biologist at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas who was not involved in the study, says that really nailing down what the whistles mean will be a big challenge that will need good behavioral data. 'If the animal swims away from the whistle, did you offend it somehow? Did you play an alarm whistle? Did you whistle something that was so loud it scared them? You have no idea what's going on inside that animal's head.' The research is still in its infancy. But dolphins are life-long learners, appear to use specific names, and females communicate at higher frequencies with their children—like human 'motherese.' The research team in Sarasota thinks this all suggests a wider repertoire of shared sounds that could reflect a starting point for a 'language-like communication system'. 'If there is a species that we might be able to kind of try to engage with in some kind of two way communication, these guys are really good candidates,' says Sayigh. Whether or not the dolphins' communication is 'language-like' depends on how 'language' is defined, says Sara Torres Ortiz, a biologist at the University of Southern Denmark also not involved in the research. If the criteria is referential signaling— specific sounds referring to specific objects or events—this ability has been seen in other animals, including vervet monkeys and prairie dogs. 'Given these precedents, it would not be surprising if dolphins also possess some form of referential communication,' she says. Other animals may even have communication systems that are more effective than the sounds and cues that humans think of as language, says Bruck, including dolphins who collect information about their friends through urine. 'If we take the animals out of our own heads and we take them for what they are, you find that there's a lot of complexity in what they do as it is.'
Indian Express
17-05-2025
- Science
- Indian Express
An attempt at understanding dolphin language is being made — will people listen?
Since it was first published in 1979, Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has seen generations of the philosophically minded expand on some of its themes. The series of books is comical, of course, as it satirises ontology, metaphysics, the pomposity of politicians, the dreadful diatribes of bureaucrats. But in all the fun of puns, Adams often stumbled into, perhaps knowingly, profound questions. The most popular of these is the Babel Fish argument — based on a creature that, by eliminating all boundaries to interspecies communication across the galaxy, caused the most dreadful wars of all. And then there's the enigma of dolphins. As the Earth is about to be destroyed in the first book, they leave the planet, leaving behind a one-line message: 'So long, and thanks for all the fish.' Now, as AI models threaten and promise to make the fears and fortunes of sci-fi worlds a reality, Adams's questions might just be answered. This year, the Coller-Dolittle Prize — given for research into two-way inter-species communication — was awarded to the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. It has used non-invasive methodologies to study the various vocalisations and body language of bottlenose dolphins for about 40 years. This data can be used to train AI models that can potentially uncover the layers of meaning in non-human language. The dolphins in Hitchhiker's were smarter than human beings. And perhaps, for a given definition of intelligence, life can imitate art. For a long time, human beings have ignored the personhood of intelligent animals. Elephants, higher primates, dolphins and whales — there are several species that have language and heritage, that laugh and cry and grieve, have a sense of family, self and community. Perhaps AI can translate their realities in a way humans can understand them, and learn from them. But then, given that people are so adept at treating people as things, what chance does a dolphin have?
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Dolphin whistle decoders win $100,000 interspecies communication prize
A $100,000 prize for communicating with animals has been scooped by researchers who have shed light on the meaning of dolphins' whistles. The Coller-Dolittle Prize for Two-way Inter-species Communication was launched last year by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. The winning team, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program led by Laela Sayigh and Peter Tyack from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been studying bottle-nosed dolphins in waters near Sarasota, Florida, for more than four decades. The researchers used non-invasive technologies such as hydrophones and digital acoustic tags attached by suction cups to record the animals' sounds. These include name-like 'signature' whistles, as well as 'non-signature' whistles – sounds that make up about 50% of the animals' calls but are poorly understood. In their latest work, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team identified at least 20 different types of non-signature whistle that are produced by multiple dolphins, finding two types were each shared by at least 25 individuals. When the researchers played these two sounds back to dolphins they found one triggered avoidance in the animals, suggesting it could be an alarm signal, while the other triggered a range of responses, suggesting it could be a sound made by dolphins when they encounter something unexpected. Sayigh said the win was a surprise, adding: 'I really didn't expect it, so I am beyond thrilled. It is such an honour.' The judging panel was led by Yossi Yovel, professor of zoology at Tel Aviv University, whose own team has previously used machine-learning algorithms to unpick the meaning of squeaks made by bats as they argue. 'We were mostly impressed by the long term, huge dataset that was created, and we're sure that it will lead to many more new and interesting results,' said Yovel, adding the judges were also impressed by team's use of non-invasive technology to record the animals' calls, and the use of drones and speakers to demonstrate the dolphins' responses in the field. Yovel added the judges hoped the prize would aid the application of AI to the data to reveal even more impressive results. Jonathan Birch, aprofessor of philosophy at London School of Economics and one of the judges, said the main thing stopping humans from cracking the code of animal communication was a lack of data. 'Think of the trillion words needed to train a large language model like ChatGPT. We don't have anything like this for other animals,' he said. 'That's why we need programs like the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which has built up an extraordinary library of dolphin whistles over 40 years. The cumulative result of all that work is that Laela Sayigh and her team can now use deep learning to analyse the whistles and perhaps, one day, crack the code.' Yovel said about 20 teams entered this year's competition, resulting in four finalists. Besides Sayigh and Tyack's team, these included teams working on understanding communication in nightingales, cuttlefish, and marmosets. He added the 202-26 prize was now open for applications. As well as an annual award of $100,000, there is also a grand prize up for grabs totalling either $10m in investment or $500,000 in cash. To win that, researchers must develop an algorithm to allow an animal to 'communicate independently without recognising that it is communicating with humans' – something Jeremy Coller suggested might be achieved within the next five years. The challenge is inspired by the Turing test for AI, whereby humans must be unable to tell whether they are conversing with a computer or a real person for the system to be deemed successful. Robert Seyfarth, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the prize, welcomed the win. 'These are outstanding scientists, doing work that has revolutionised our understanding of dolphin communication and cognition. This is well-deserved recognition,' he said. Clara Mancini, professor of animal-computer interaction at the Open University, said the dolphin work showed technology's potential to advance our understanding of animal communication, possibly one day even enabling people to communicate with them on their own terms. 'I think one of the main benefits of these advances is that they could finally demonstrate that animals' communication systems can be just as sophisticated and effective for use in the environments in which their users have evolved, as human language is for our species,' she said. 'However, on the journey towards interspecies communication, I would suggest, we need to remain mindful that deciphering a language is not the same as understanding the experience of language users and that, as well as curiosity, the challenge requires humility and respect for the unique knowledge and worldview that each species possesses.'
