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Gizmodo
17-05-2025
- Science
- Gizmodo
AI Is Deciphering Animal Speech. Should We Try to Talk Back?
Chirps, trills, growls, howls, squawks. Animals converse in all kinds of ways, yet humankind has only scratched the surface of how they communicate with each other and the rest of the living world. Our species has trained some animals—and if you ask cats, animals have trained us, too—but we've yet to truly crack the code on interspecies communication. Increasingly, animal researchers are deploying artificial intelligence to accelerate our investigations of animal communication—both within species and between branches on the tree of life. As scientists chip away at the complex communication systems of animals, they move closer to understanding what creatures are saying—and maybe even how to talk back. But as we try to bridge the linguistic gap between humans and animals, some experts are raising valid concerns about whether such capabilities are appropriate—or whether we should even attempt to communicate with animals at all. Using AI to untangle animal language Towards the front of the pack—or should I say pod?—is Project CETI, which has used machine learning to analyze more than 8,000 sperm whale 'codas'—structured click patterns recorded by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Researchers uncovered contextual and combinatorial structures in the whales' clicks, naming features like 'rubato' and 'ornamentation' to describe how whales subtly adjust their vocalizations during conversation. These patterns helped the team create a kind of phonetic alphabet for the animals—an expressive, structured system that may not be language as we know it but reveals a level of complexity that researchers weren't previously aware of. Project CETI is also working on ethical guidelines for the technology, a critical goal given the risks of using AI to 'talk' to the animals. Meanwhile, Google and the Wild Dolphin Project recently introduced DolphinGemma, a large language model (LLM) trained on 40 years of dolphin vocalizations. Just as ChatGPT is an LLM for human inputs—taking visual information like research papers and images and producing responses to relevant queries—DolphinGemma intakes dolphin sound data and predicts what vocalization comes next. DolphinGemma can even generate dolphin-like audio, and the researchers' prototype two-way system, Cetacean Hearing Augmentation Telemetry (fittingly, CHAT), uses a smartphone-based interface that dolphins employ to request items like scarves or seagrass—potentially laying the groundwork for future interspecies dialogue. 'DolphinGemma is being used in the field this season to improve our real-time sound recognition in the CHAT system,' said Denise Herzing, founder and director of the Wild Dolphin Project, which spearheaded the development of DolphinGemma in collaboration with researchers at Google DeepMind, in an email to Gizmodo. 'This fall we will spend time ingesting known dolphin vocalizations and let Gemma show us any repeatable patterns they find,' such as vocalizations used in courtship and mother-calf discipline. In this way, Herzing added, the AI applications are two-fold: Researchers can use it both to explore dolphins' natural sounds and to better understand the animals' responses to human mimicking of dolphin sounds, which are synthetically produced by the AI CHAT system. Expanding the animal AI toolkit Outside the ocean, researchers are finding that human speech models can be repurposed to decode terrestrial animal signals, too. A University of Michigan-led team used Wav2Vec2—a speech recognition model trained on human voices—to identify dogs' emotions, genders, breeds, and even individual identities based on their barks. The pre-trained human model outperformed a version trained solely on dog data, suggesting that human language model architectures could be surprisingly effective in decoding animal communication. Of course, we need to consider the different levels of sophistication these AI models are targeting. Determining whether a dog's bark is aggressive or playful, or whether it's male or female—these are perhaps understandably easier for a model to determine than, say, the nuanced meaning encoded in sperm whale phonetics. Nevertheless, each study inches scientists closer to understanding how AI tools, as they currently exist, can be best applied to such an expansive field—and gives the AI a chance to train itself to become a more useful part of the researcher's toolkit. And even cats—often seen as aloof—appear to be more communicative than they let on. In a 2022 study out of Paris Nanterre University, cats showed clear signs of recognizing their owner's voice, but beyond that, the felines responded more intensely when spoken to directly in 'cat talk.' That suggests cats not only pay attention to what we say, but also how we say it—especially when it comes from someone they know. Earlier this month, a pair of cuttlefish researchers found evidence that the animals have a set of four 'waves,' or physical gestures, that they make to one another, as well as to human playback of cuttlefish waves. The group plans to apply an algorithm to categorize the types of waves, automatically track the creatures' movements, and understand the contexts in which the animals express themselves more rapidly. Private companies (such as Google) are also getting in on the act. Last week, China's largest search engine, Baidu, filed a patent with the country's IP administration proposing to translate animal (specifically cat) vocalizations into human language. The quick and dirty on the tech is that it would intake a trove of data from your kitty, and then use an AI model to analyze the data, determine the animal's emotional state, and output the apparent human language message your pet was trying to convey. A universal translator for animals? Together, these studies represent a major shift in how scientists are approaching animal communication. Rather than starting from scratch, research teams are building tools and models designed for humans—and making advances that would have taken much longer otherwise. The end goal could (read: could) be a kind of Rosetta Stone for the animal kingdom, powered by AI. 'We've gotten really good at analyzing human language just in the last five years, and we're beginning to perfect this practice of transferring models trained on one dataset and applying them to new data,' said Sara Keen, a behavioral ecologist and electrical engineer at the Earth Species Project, in a video call with Gizmodo. The Earth Species Project plans to launch its flagship audio-language model for animal sounds, NatureLM, this year, and a demo for NatureLM-audio is already live. With input data from across the tree of life—as well as human speech, environmental sounds, and even music detection—the model aims to become a converter of human speech into animal analogues. The model 'shows promising domain transfer from human speech to animal communication,' the project states, 'supporting our hypothesis that shared representations in AI can help decode animal languages.' 'A big part of our work really is trying to change the way people think about our place in the world,' Keen added. 'We're making cool discoveries about animal communication, but ultimately we're finding that other species are just as complicated and nuanced as we are. And that revelation is pretty exciting.' The ethical dilemma Indeed, researchers generally agree on the promise of AI-based tools for improving the collection and interpretation of animal communication data. But some feel that there's a breakdown in communication between that scholarly familiarity and the public's perception of how these tools can be applied. 'I think there's currently a lot of misunderstanding in the coverage of this topic—that somehow machine learning can create this contextual knowledge out of nothing. That so long as you have thousands of hours of audio recordings, somehow some magic machine learning black box can squeeze meaning out of that,' said Christian Rutz, an expert in animal behavior and cognition and founding president of International Bio-Logging Society, in a video call with Gizmodo. 'That's not going to happen.' 'Meaning comes through the contextual annotation and this is where I think it's really important for this field as a whole, in this period of excitement and enthusiasm, to not forget that this annotation comes from basic behavioral ecology and natural history expertise,' Rutz added. In other words, let's not put the horse before the cart, especially since the cart—in this case—is what's powering the horse. But with great power…you know the cliché. Essentially, how can humans develop and apply these technologies in a way that is both scientifically illuminating and minimizes harm or disruption to its animal subjects? Experts have put forward ethical standards and guardrails for using the technologies that prioritize the welfare of creatures as we get closer to—well, wherever the technology is going. As AI advances, conversations about animal rights will have to evolve. In the future, animals could become more active participants in those conversations—a notion that legal experts are exploring as a thought exercise, but one that could someday become reality. 'What we desperately need—apart from advancing the machine learning side—is to forge these meaningful collaborations between the machine learning experts and the animal behavior researchers,' Rutz said, 'because it's only when you put the two of us together that you stand a chance.' There's no shortage of communication data to feed into data-hungry AI models, from pitch-perfect prairie dog squeaks to snails' slimy trails (yes, really). But exactly how we make use of the information we glean from these new approaches requires thorough consideration of the ethics involved in 'speaking' with animals. A recent paper on the ethical concerns of using AI to communicate with whales outlined six major problem areas. These include privacy rights, cultural and emotional harm to whales, anthropomorphism, technological solutionism (an overreliance on technology to fix problems), gender bias, and limited effectiveness for actual whale conservation. That last issue is especially urgent, given how many whale populations are already under serious threat. It increasingly appears that we're on the brink of learning much more about the ways animals interact with one another—indeed, pulling back the curtain on their communication could also yield insights into how they learn, socialize, and act within their environments. But there are still significant challenges to overcome, such as asking ourselves how we use the powerful technologies currently in development.
India Today
09-05-2025
- Science
- India Today
Baidu in China working on AI that will let humans understand animals
Have you ever wondered what your cat or dog is trying to say? Sounds ambitious, right? Well, Baidu is now working on something that might help with this. For those who don't know, Baidu is a Chinese tech company founded in 2000, and is known for running the country's biggest search engine. It wants to use AI to understand what animals are feeling or trying to say. The company recently filed a patent with the China National Intellectual Property Administration that describes a special system that could change animal sounds into human language. This system would use a mix of animal sounds, behaviour, and body signals to guess the animal's emotions and then turn those emotions into words we can to Baidu's patent, the system will first collect sounds made by animals, such as meows, barks or other vocalisations. It will also look at their behaviour, like how they move or act, along with body data like heart rate. All of this information will be processed together using AI to figure out what the animal might be feeling — like happiness, fear or hunger. Then, the system — in theory — would match these feelings with words or phrases in human language. This could allow people to talk with their pets in a whole new said in the patent that the system would allow 'deeper emotional communication and understanding between animals and humans, improving the accuracy and efficiency of cross-species communication.' When asked about when this product might be ready, a Baidu spokesperson said, 'There has been a lot of interest in the filing of our patent application. Currently, it is still in the research phase.'advertisementBaidu is not the only one working on this idea. Around the world, other scientists are also trying to use AI to study how animals communicate. For example, Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) is studying how sperm whales talk to each other using sounds. Another group called the Earth Species Project is also working to decode animal communication using technology. That project is supported by big names, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid news of Baidu's new animal translation patent came out, many folks on Chinese social media started talking. Some were excited, while others weren't so sure about the whole idea. A Weibo user wrote, 'While it sounds impressive, we'll need to see how it performs in real-world applications.'
The Hindu
08-05-2025
- Business
- The Hindu
China's Baidu looks to patent AI system to decipher animal sounds
Ever wished you could understand what your cat is trying to tell you? A Chinese tech company is exploring whether it's possible to translate those mysterious meows into human language using artificial intelligence. Baidu, owner of China's largest search engine, has filed a patent with China National Intellectual Property Administration proposing a system to convert animal vocalisations into human language, according to a patent document published this week. Scientists have long attempted to decode animal communication, and Baidu's patent represents the latest effort to leverage AI to do so. The document says the system will collect animal data, including vocal sounds, behavioural patterns, and physiological signals, which will be preprocessed and merged before an AI-powered analysis designed to recognise the animal's emotional state. The emotional states would then be mapped to semantic meanings and translated into human language. The system could allow "deeper emotional communication and understanding between animals and humans, improving the accuracy and efficiency of cross-species communication," Baidu said in the patent document. "There has been a lot of interest in the filing of our patent application," a Baidu spokesperson said when asked how soon the company could turn the patent into a product. "Currently, it is still in the research phase." Baidu was among the first major Chinese companies to invest heavily in AI following the 2022 debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It unveiled its latest AI model, Ernie 4.5 Turbo, last month, saying it matched the industry's best in several benchmark tests. However, the Ernie chatbot has struggled to gain traction amid fierce competition. A number of efforts are underway outside China to try and interpret what animals want to convey. International researchers at Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) have been using statistical analysis and AI since 2020 to understand how sperm whales communicate, while the Earth Species Project, a non-profit founded in 2017 whose backers include LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, is also trying to use AI to decode animal communication. Local media reports about Baidu's patent application sparked discussion on Chinese social media platforms late on Wednesday. While some were excited about the possibility of eventually being better able to understand their pets, others were sceptical. "While it sounds impressive, we'll need to see how it performs in real-world applications," commented a user on Weibo.
The Star
08-05-2025
- Business
- The Star
China's Baidu looks to patent AI system to decipher animal sounds
What's that, kitty? Scientists have long attempted to decode animal communication, and Baidu's patent represents the latest effort to leverage AI to do so. — Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash BEIJING: Ever wished you could understand what your cat is trying to tell you? A Chinese tech company is exploring whether it's possible to translate those mysterious meows into human language using artificial intelligence. Baidu, owner of China's largest search engine, has filed a patent with China National Intellectual Property Administration proposing a system to convert animal vocalisations into human language, according to a patent document published this week. Scientists have long attempted to decode animal communication, and Baidu's patent represents the latest effort to leverage AI to do so. The document says the system will collect animal data, including vocal sounds, behavioural patterns, and physiological signals, which will be preprocessed and merged before an AI-powered analysis designed to recognise the animal's emotional state. The emotional states would then be mapped to semantic meanings and translated into human language. The system could allow "deeper emotional communication and understanding between animals and humans, improving the accuracy and efficiency of cross-species communication," Baidu said in the patent document. "There has been a lot of interest in the filing of our patent application," a Baidu spokesperson said when asked how soon the company could turn the patent into a product. "Currently, it is still in the research phase." Baidu was among the first major Chinese companies to invest heavily in AI following the 2022 debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT. It unveiled its latest AI model, Ernie 4.5 Turbo, last month, saying it matched the industry's best in several benchmark tests. However, the Ernie chatbot has struggled to gain traction amid fierce competition. A number of efforts are underway outside China to try and interpret what animals want to convey. International researchers at Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) have been using statistical analysis and AI since 2020 to understand how sperm whales communicate, while the Earth Species Project, a non-profit founded in 2017 whose backers include LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman, is also trying to use AI to decode animal communication. Local media reports about Baidu's patent application sparked discussion on Chinese social media platforms late on Wednesday. While some were excited about the possibility of eventually being better able to understand their pets, others were sceptical. "While it sounds impressive, we'll need to see how it performs in real-world applications," commented a user on Weibo. – Reuters
National Geographic
24-04-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
Whales could one day defend themselves in court—and in their own words
Scientists are closer than ever to deciphering sperm whale communication. Their breakthroughs could open the door to expanded whale rights and even legal personhood. A pod of sperm whales swims off the coast of Dominica, where researchers continue to make significant progress in their efforts to understand how the creatures converse amongst themselves. Photograph By Tony Wu, Minden Two summers ago, in the turquoise waters off the coast of a small Caribbean island called Dominica, a sperm whale named Rounder began to give birth. Eleven members of her clan slowly gathered around to support her, converging from miles away in their home waters. They called to one another in choruses of Morse code-like clicks as they waited for the baby to arrive and in the hours that followed, when they held the calf above water so that she could breathe, only lowering her when her fins finished unfurling. Soon after, they departed. Scientists are developing innovations in recording and analyzing sperm whale communications that could someday make it possible to understand at least some of what whales say to each other in these extraordinary moments. People might translate what they only now surmise: expressions of care and joy, arrangements of duties, cries of pain and discomfort. With those translations would come profound and surprising legal questions. Might a richer understanding of what sperm whales say breathe new life into laws that presently offer only incomplete, often-unenforced protections? Could legal systems recognize whales as persons, their interests so important as to be accorded formal rights? 'I think we're just now on the cusp of this immense legal world,' says David Gruber, a marine biologist and National Geographic Explorer. Scientists with Project CETI use machine learning software to find patterns within the rapid clicks that comprise sperm whale vocalizations. This research may lead to a deeper understanding of their language. Photograph By Franco Banfi, Nature Picture Library Gruber is the founder and president of Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative), which has gathered dozens of linguists, biologists, roboticists, and experts in artificial intelligence to document the lives and communications of Dominica's sperm whales. Their work builds on several decades of findings in the field of animal communication—not only in sperm whales but throughout the animal world, from songbird syntax to chimpanzee gestures and river turtle repertoires. Gruber's team is working to translate whale conversation with an unprecedented richness and detail. They hope to eventually develop a quasi–Google Translate for cetaceans, which would convert sperm whale sounds into human language and vice versa. Already, Gruber and his colleagues are beginning to anticipate some of the legal implications of this work. In a new working paper that is expected to be published later this fall in the journal Ecology Law Quarterly, they note that one result might be a world in which humans 'undeniably understand' these creatures' experience from their own perspective. 'Such insights could provide a groundwork for new laws and inform how existing laws regulate actions that impact cetaceans.' To explore what might become possible, Gruber tapped a leading team of experts, including César Rodríguez-Garavito, director of the More-than-Human Rights Project at New York University; Ashley Otilia Nemeth, an attorney at NYU's TERRA Clinic; and CETI linguistics lead Gašper Beguš of the University of California, Berkeley. They offer a new framework for thinking about the law that is rooted in the way whales experience the world. Discover More, Spend Less With new subscriber-exclusive stories published daily and complete archive access, your opportunities to explore are endless! Consider, for instance, the problem of ocean noise pollution. For creatures like sperm whales, who rely upon echolocation to find food and to navigate, and who remain in near-constant vocal contact with family and friends, sound is paramount. Humanity's growing aquatic din—oil and gas exploration, construction, military sonar, and most of all ship engine noise—is a clear harm, disrupting the basic activities of sperm whale life. Project CETI lead David Gruber, left, has brought together a world class team of experts in marine biology, robotics, artificial intelligence, and linguistics to better understand sperm whale communication. Photograph By Michael Lees, CETI Project 'We have very good evidence of the impacts,' says Rodríguez-Garavito, yet that evidence has yielded piecemeal progress. The federal Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act—the bedrock of cetacean protections in the United States—provide a legal framework for preventing harms, but government agencies have mostly neglected to apply rules against harming cetaceans to cases of noise-induced harm. The same toothlessness holds for other attempts to curb underwater noise, such as new regulations passed in the European Union and by the International Maritime Organization. But what if whales were documented not only straining to make themselves heard above the racket, but actually talking about it? Were a sperm whale heard articulating the pain and difficulty caused by a ship's eardrum-rattling, echolocation-scrambling engine noise, their words would likely carry more weight in a court of law than do human descriptions of the problem. Being able to present the whales' own testimony, so to speak, might move—or shame—government agencies and judges to action. It 'would help us make more of a convincing case,' says Rodríguez-Garavito, and a deeper understanding of sperm whale communication could inspire even farther-reaching legal claims. Animal advocates and conservationists might be able to argue that near-constant physical and psychological stress caused by chronic noise pollution actually violate the spirit of international prohibitions against torture. Sensory deprivation and overstimulation are already recognized as torturous for humans; recognizing the same for whales could lead to new, more urgent protections. Advocates could also assert that by disrupting communication and social activities, noise pollution interferes with sperm whale culture—and that the whales should qualify, again in spirit if not in letter, for recognitions afforded by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which enshrines a right to participation in cultural life. After all, culture—socially transmitted information that is passed between generations—is already known to be a significant feature of sperm whale life. Different clans have different dialects, lifestyles, and social customs. Even when their waters overlap, clan members often keep to themselves, and their structure resembles that of human tribes. But those are coarse descriptions; to learn about the whales' cultures through their own words would provide a finer understanding of them. It would put a sharper point on what is lost when humans destroy those cultures or remove individuals from them—by hitting them with ships, hunting them for profit, or capturing them for entertainment. Perhaps that deeper, first-person understanding could again lead to new protections or reinforce existing ones. Maybe advocates will be able to call not merely for protections, but true rights: the explicit legal recognition of an interest as profoundly, inviolably important. That leads to the topic of legal personhood, defined by the late Steven Wise, founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, as the capacity to have any rights at all. In the United States, rights are exclusively human. No animal has ever been accorded a full legal right; although laws against cruelty and the mistreatment of animals provide some protections, they have neither the force nor versatility offered by rights. A sperm whale socializes with its pod in the Caribbean Sea. In the near future, researchers may be able to gain a deeper understanding of these behaviors by being able to communicate directly with the animals, which could lend support to new forms of legal protection. Photograph By Franco Banfi, Nature Picture Library The Nonhuman Rights Project has tried to cross that legal divide by filing lawsuits seeking the release of captive chimpanzees and elephants. The lawsuits draw on scientific research showing how those species share the mental capacities—including rich forms of self-awareness, emotions, and society, and the ability to plan for the future and make choices—that in humans give rise to autonomy and thus underlie our right to be free from arbitrary imprisonment. As a matter of equality, Nonhuman Rights Project lawyers argue this right should be extended to chimpanzees and elephants as well. Courts have so far rejected that argument, and among their stated justifications is the idea that in order to have rights, one must also be able to bear social responsibilities and legal duties: the right to liberty comes with a duty not to break the law. Rodríguez-Garavito and his co-authors suggest that Project CETI's work could illuminate how sperm whales negotiate their own social responsibilities, such as helping mothers deliver and protect their babies, thus establishing them as duty-bearers in the law's eyes. Project CETI teams members Darren Gibbons, Yaniv Aluma, and Odel Harve work from a Whale Listening Station floating in the Caribbean Sea. Such outposts are one of the innovations Project CETI has developed to help capture and analyze whale sounds. Photograph By CETI Project Translating the caregiving arrangements whales make with each other will not likely satisfy reluctant judges, though. Spencer Lo, an attorney with the Nonhuman Rights Project, noted that judges already dismiss scientific evidence of social responsibilities fulfilled by chimpanzees and elephants. Instead those animals are found wanting in their inability to explicitly understand human legal codes—an expectation that is not applied to babies or people with severe dementia, who are similarly unable to understand laws but still have rights. That double standard speaks to the essential discomfort most judges have with the idea of animal personhood. And even when courts don't cite the 'rights and duties' standard, they have found other rationales. Those rejections are ultimately rooted in the belief that 'humans are qualitatively—and thus morally and legally—distinct from all nonhuman animals,' says Lo. He thinks that Project CETI's work, and that of other researchers deciphering complex animal communication, has 'transformative potential,' but not because it will reinforce any particular legal argument. Rather, that potential resides in its power 'to undermine human exceptionalism and thereby bolster the case for personhood.' Yet despite their courtroom struggles, the Nonhuman Rights Project has arguably triumphed in the court of public opinion. Understanding sperm whale communication may not lead directly to new laws or precedents—but it should still nourish empathy and care. A young calf swims alongside two adults off the coast of Dominica, where, in 2023, Gruber and his team became the first research group to document the birth of a sperm whale in the region. From that encounter, they hope to gain a richer understanding of pivotal moments in these animals' lives. Photograph By Brian Skerry, Nat Geo Image Collection Even as U.S. courts have refused to recognize animals as persons, however, jurisdictions elsewhere have been more open-minded. In recent years, judges in several countries have declared that some animals should be considered persons; in Panama, for example, sea turtles now have a federally recognized right to freedom from human harm, and Ecuador's highest court took the extraordinary step of declaring that all animals are legal persons. Discussion is now ongoing about the rights that each species deserves. Kristen Stilt, faculty director of Harvard University's animal law program, used the analogy of fluid flowing through pipes to illustrate how better understandings of animal communication could lead to legal change. In the United States, she says, new information flows through 'a couple little straws,' but in places that are open-minded to animal rights, 'it's like you've got this massive pipe, and all this [information] can flow in all these different directions.' Leading scientists and legal scholars are already considering the potential harms of this technology. 'In the miraculous event that we do eventually 'crack the code,'' says Philippa Brakes, a behavioral ecologist at Massey University in Australia, 'there are issues such as the potential for communications with wildlife to be used for nefarious purposes.' Gruber agrees and adds that technology developed by Project CETI and other researchers could be turned to ill not only by people who want to harm whales, but by well-intentioned yet careless people. He is especially troubled by the thought of people 'racing to try some of these fancy new AI tools"—tools that not only translate whale communication but mimic it—without fully understanding what is being communicated. 'We must still grapple with the potential impacts of its research and what its findings may equip others to do,' write Gruber's team. The possibility should be 'understood as a clarion call for ethical and legal safeguards.' A sperm whale calf swims near the surface of the Caribbean Sea. Translating the conversations of such animals may not immediately lead to new legal protections, but it shed light on challenges they may face. Photogrpah By Brian Skerry, Nat Geo Image Collection Stilt has even more fundamental reservations. If complex animal communication and our ability to translate it becomes the basis for ethical regard, a bar that animals must clear for their interests to be recognized, it would 'take us backwards,' she says. That would give people an excuse for failing to act on what is already known about animals, the harms we cause, and how we should treat them, regardless of whether they speak in a suitably human-like way. The Project CETI team shares those reservations too. 'Why must nonhuman animals resemble humans for us to empathize with their pain and safeguard their well-being?' they write. 'Must they articulate their suffering when we already possess a clear understanding of the injuries we cause?' The quest to find and translate complex animal communication should not diminish the worth of creatures who don't appear to have those capacities, says Rodríguez-Garavito. We may simply fail to appreciate their intelligence; and the lack of rich communication does not make any life less special. But it would still be incredible, and perhaps transformative, to know what sperm whales say—and this could be seen as an entry point, a beginning rather than a destination, on the journey to appreciating all creatures.
