Latest news with #LaelaSayigh
CNET
26-05-2025
- Science
- CNET
Dolphin Researchers Win $100,000 AI Prize for Studying Their Whistling
If any dolphins are reading this: Hello! A team of scientists studying a community of Florida dolphins has been awarded the first $100,000 Coller Dolittle Challenge prize, established to award research in interspecies communication algorithms. The team used non-invasive hydrophones to perform the research, which offers evidence that dolphins may be using whistles like words, shared with multiple members of their communities. A type of whistle dolphins employ is used as an alarm, according to the US-based team led by Laela Sayigh of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Another whistle the team studied is used by dolphins to respond to unexpected or unfamiliar situations. Capturing the sounds is just the beginning. Researchers will use AI to continue deciphering the whistles to try to find more patterns. "The main thing stopping us cracking the code of animal communication is a lack of data. Think of the 1 trillion words needed to train a large language model like ChatGPT. We don't have anything like this for other animals," said Jonathan Birch, a professor at London School of Economics and Political Science and one of the judges for the prize. "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 analyze the whistles and perhaps, one day, crack the code," Brich added. The award was part of a ceremony that honored the work of four teams from across the world. In addition to the dolphin project, researchers studied ways in which nightingales, marmoset monkeys and cuttlefish communicate. The challenge is a collaboration between the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. Submissions for next year open in August. Dolphin language is just the start Researching animals and trying to learn the secrets of their communication is nothing new, but AI is speeding up the creation of larger and larger datasets. "Breakthroughs are inevitable," said Kate Zacarian, CEO and co-founder of Earth Species Project, a California-based nonprofit that also works in breaking down language barriers with the animal world. "Just as AI has revolutionized the fields of medicine and material science, we see a similar opportunity to bring those advances to the study of animal communication and empower researchers in this space with entirely new capabilities," she said. Zacarian applauded Sayigh's team and their win and said it will help bring broader recognition to the study of non-human animal communication. It could also bring more attention to ways that AI can change the nature of this type of research. "The AI systems aren't just faster. They allow for entirely new types of inquiry," she said. "We're moving from decoding isolated signals to exploring communication as a rich, dynamic, and structure phenomenon, which is a task that's simply too big for our human brains, but possible for large-scale AI models." The Earth Species Project recently released an open-source large audio language model for analyzing animal sounds known as NatureLM audio. The organization is now working with biologists and ethologists to study species including orcas, carrion crows, jumping spiders and more. It plans to release some of their findings later this year, Zacarian said.
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.'
CNET
20-05-2025
- Science
- CNET
Want to Speak to Dolphins? Researchers Won $100,000 AI Prize Studying Their Whistling
If any dolphins are reading this: hello! A team of scientists studying a community of Florida dolphins has been awarded the first $100,000 Coller Dolittle Challenge prize, set up to award research in interspecies communication algorithms. The US-based team, led by Laela Sayigh of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, found that a type of whistle that dolphins employ is used as an alarm. Another whistle they studied is used by dolphins to respond to unexpected or unfamiliar situations. The team used non-invasive hydrophones to perform the research, which provides evidence that dolphins may be using whistles like words, shared with multiple members of their communities. Capturing the sounds is just the beginning. Researchers will use AI to continue deciphering the whistles to try to find more patterns. "The main thing stopping us cracking the code of animal communication is a lack of data. Think of the 1 trillion words needed to train a large language model like ChatGPT. We don't have anything like this for other animals," said Jonathan Birch, a professor at the London School of Economics and Politics and one of the judges for the prize. "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," he said. The award was part of a ceremony honoring the work of four teams from across the world. In addition to the dolphin project, researchers studied ways in which nightingales, marmoset monkeys and cuttlefish communicate. The challenge is a collaboration between the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. Submissions for next year open up in August. Dolphins are just the beginning Researching animals and trying to learn the secrets of their communication is nothing new; but AI is speeding up the creation of larger and lager datasets. "Breakthroughs are inevitable," says Kate Zacarian, CEO and co-founder of Earth Species Project, a California-based nonprofit that also works in breaking down language barriers with the animal world. "Just as AI has revolutionized the fields of medicine and material science, we see a similar opportunity to bring those advances to the study of animal communication and empower researchers in this space with entirely new capabilities," Zacarian said. Zacarian applauded Sayigh's team and their win and said it will help bring broader recognition to the study of non-human animal communication. It could also bring more attention to ways that AI can change the nature of this type of research. "The AI systems aren't just faster -- they allow for entirely new types of inquiry," she said. "We're moving from decoding isolated signals to exploring communication as a rich, dynamic, and structure phenomenon -- whish is a task that's simply too big for our human brains, but possible for large-scale AI models." Earth Species recently released an open-source large audio language model for analyzing animal sounds called NatureLM-audio. The organization is currently working with biologists and ethologists to study species including carrion crows, orcas, jumping spiders and others and plans to release some of their findings later this year, Zacarian said.
CNET
19-05-2025
- Science
- CNET
Want To Speak to Dophins? Researchers Won $100,000 AI Prize Studying Their Whistling
If any dolphins are reading this: hello! A team of scientists studying a community of Florida dolphins have been awarded the first $100,000 Coller Dolittle Challenge prize, set up to award research in interspecies communication algorithms. The US-based team led by Laela Sayigh of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution found that a type of whistles that dolphins employ is used as an alarm. Another they studied is used by dolphins to respond to unexpected or unfamiliar situations. The team used non-invasive hydrophones to perform the research, which provides evidence that dolphins may be using whistles like words shared with multiple members of their communities. Capturing the sounds is just the beginning: researchers will use AI to continue deciphering the whistle to try to find more patterns. "The main thing stopping us cracking the code of animal communication is a lack of data. Think of the 1 trillion words needed to train a large language model like ChatGPT. We don't have anything like this for other animals," said Jonathan Birch, a professor at the London School of Economics and Politics and one of the judges for the prize. "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," he said. The award was part of a ceremony honoring the work of four teams from across the world. In addition to the dolphin project, researchers studied ways in which nightingales, marmoset monkeys and cuttlefish communicate. The challenge is a collaboration between the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. Submissions for next year open up in August.
