a day ago
Whale said: How far have we come in the quest to eavesdrop on animals?
For centuries, human beings believed they were the only species that could 'speak'. MAMA?: Research has shown that elephants respond to the unique calls family groups use for specific individuals. (Adobe stock)
The buzzing of bees, calls of birds, lion's roar and dolphin's screech were just a background score in this production in which we were the main characters; nobody else got any lines.
Then, in the early 1900s, Karl von Frisch proved that honeybees perform a dance in the hive that conveys to other bees where the nearest food sources are. This kicked off the study of how animals communicate.
By the 1960s, it was clear that certain species call and sing to each other in notes that vary with the message: summons, warning, invitation to mate. One such set of sounds, recorded by Roger Payne, Katy Payne and Scott McVay, became the best-selling 1970 album Songs of the Humpback Whale.
Now, researchers are finally beginning to decode how some of this communication works.
In February, for instance, an international study published in the journal Science analysed eight years of recordings from humpback whales to find that certain shorter sounds are used far more frequently than other, more complex ones. Essentially, whale songs fall into a pattern called the Zipfian distribution, in which the most common word in a language (eg 'the') shows up twice as often as the second-most-used word, and three times as often as the third-most-common word (and so on).
The Zipfian distribution is common to all human languages. The fact that it appears to hold true for whales indicated that their songs convey far more than innate, reflexive responses to external stimuli.
The unexpected discovery was made because the study roped in behavioural ecologists, scientists and linguists to work with the marine biologists. This kind of collaborative research is part of what is pushing the envelope in this field; the other big change, of course, is machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI).
Last June, ML helped a team of researchers (led by behavioural ecologist Mickey Pardo of Colorado State University) analyse 469 vocalisations made by family groups of adult female African elephants in Kenya and their offspring, over 14 months. Their study, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, showed that the animals appear to have unique calls for specific individuals.
When these calls were played back to the elephants, the researchers noted, specific individuals reacted to their 'names', perking up their ears and rumbling back in reply.
In the Dominican Islands, meanwhile, since May last year, marine biologist David Gruber and his research organisation Project CETI (for Cetacean Translation Initiative) have been working to use AI to decode what sperm whales are saying, in their Morse-code-like pattern of clicks called coda. They plan to then use AI to generate clicks of their own, in an effort to 'speak back'.
Elsewhere, marine biologist Laela Sayigh and her team at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution studied the wide range of clicks and whistles used by wild bottlenose dolphins off the coast of Florida and believe they have deciphered how two of the 22 types of whistles are used. One functions as an alarm and the other as a query, says a study published as a preprint on bioRxiv this April. 'Our study provides the first evidence in dolphins for a wider repertoire of shared, context-specific signals, which could form the basis for a language-like communication system,' Sayigh and her team note.
In May, building on these signals, Google DeepMind released DolphinGemma, a large language model (LLM) that aims to help researchers gather and analyse 'dolphin-speak'.
Does this mean we could gain the ability to communicate, at least in limited ways, with certain species?
Well, two fundamental hurdles would remain, even if we did decode every whale click and dolphin whistle. Most animals appear to communicate mainly to signal ('food', 'danger', 'it's time to mate', etc), which is a more limited version of the skill humans have evolved. Meanwhile, many animals use visual, chemical and mechanical signals, alongside sound, in ways that humans do not. This could potentially make any 'speaking back' on our part both difficult and meaningless.
What we can expect, for now, is to at least gain a greater understanding of how meaningful, layered and even deeply intentional animal communication can be. Like an elephant calling out across the grasslands in Kenya, and her calf turning around, recognising the distinct sound his family uses just for him.
