Latest news with #cetaceans
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
We're close to translating animal languages – what happens then?
Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors' first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won't be long before we join the conversation once again. The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy. Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026. The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals' interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another's native vocabulary. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic 'conversation' with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as 'whup/throp' with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U. But in the excitement we should not ignore the fact that other species are already bearing eloquent witness to our impact on the natural world. A living planet is a loud one. Healthy coral reefs pop and crackle with life. But soundscapes can decay just as ecosystems can. Degraded reefs are hushed deserts. Since the 1960s, shipping and mining have raised background noise in the oceans by about three decibels a decade. Humpback whale song occupies the same low-frequency bandwidth as deep-sea dredging and drilling for the rare earths that are vital for electronic devices. Ironically, mining the minerals we need to communicate cancels out whales' voices. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours. 'Song' is apt: they seem to include rhymed phrases, and their compositions travel the oceans with them, evolving as they go in a process called 'song revolutions', where a new cycle replaces the old. (Imagine if Nina Simone or the Beatles had erased their back catalogue with every new release.) They're crucial to migration and breeding seasons. But in today's louder soundscape, whale song is crowded out of its habitual bandwidth and even driven to silence – from up to 1.2 km away from commercial ships, humpback whales will cease singing rather than compete with the noise. In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually? The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal's umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? 'If a lion could talk,' writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein's famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, 'we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.' We should ask, then, how speaking with other beings might change us. Talking to another species might be very like talking to alien life. It's no coincidence that Ceti echoes Nasa's Seti – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – Institute. In fact, a Seti team recorded the whup/throp exchange, on the basis that learning to speak with whales may help us if we ever meet intelligent extraterrestrials. In Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, whale-like aliens communicate via a script in which the distinction between past, present and future times collapses. For Louise, the linguist who translates the script, learning Heptapod lifts her mind out of linear time and into a reality in which her own past and future are equally available. The film mentions Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic determinism – the idea that our experience of reality is encoded in language – to explain this. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was dismissed in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there may be some truth to it. Pormpuraaw speakers in northern Australia refer to time moving from east to west, rather than forwards or backwards as in English, making time indivisible from the relationship between their body and the land. Whale songs are born from an experience of time that is radically different to ours. Humpbacks can project their voices over miles of open water; their songs span the widest oceans. Imagine the swell of oceanic feeling on which such sounds are borne. Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we'd think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly. Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us. • David Farrier is the author of Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet (Canongate). Why Animals Talk by Arik Kershenbaum (Viking, £10.99) Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wiley-Blackwell, £24.95) An Immense World by Ed Yong (Vintage, £12.99)
The Guardian
2 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
We're close to translating animal languages – what happens then?
Charles Darwin suggested that humans learned to speak by mimicking birdsong: our ancestors' first words may have been a kind of interspecies exchange. Perhaps it won't be long before we join the conversation once again. The race to translate what animals are saying is heating up, with riches as well as a place in history at stake. The Jeremy Coller Foundation has promised $10m to whichever researchers can crack the code. This is a race fuelled by generative AI; large language models can sort through millions of recorded animal vocalisations to find their hidden grammars. Most projects focus on cetaceans because, like us, they learn through vocal imitation and, also like us, they communicate via complex arrangements of sound that appear to have structure and hierarchy. Sperm whales communicate in codas – rapid sequences of clicks, each as brief as 1,000th of a second. Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) is using AI to analyse codas in order to reveal the mysteries of sperm whale speech. There is evidence the animals take turns, use specific clicks to refer to one another, and even have distinct dialects. Ceti has already isolated a click that may be a form of punctuation, and they hope to speak whaleish as soon as 2026. The linguistic barrier between species is already looking porous. Last month, Google released DolphinGemma, an AI program to translate dolphins, trained on 40 years of data. In 2013, scientists using an AI algorithm to sort dolphin communication identified a new click in the animals' interactions with one another, which they recognised as a sound they had previously trained the pod to associate with sargassum seaweed – the first recorded instance of a word passing from one species into another's native vocabulary. The prospect of speaking dolphin or whale is irresistible. And it seems that they are just as enthusiastic. In November last year, scientists in Alaska recorded an acoustic 'conversation' with a humpback whale called Twain, in which they exchanged a call-and-response form known as 'whup/throp' with the animal over a 20-minute period. In Florida, a dolphin named Zeus was found to have learned to mimic the vowel sounds, A, E, O, and U. But in the excitement we should not ignore the fact that other species are already bearing eloquent witness to our impact on the natural world. A living planet is a loud one. Healthy coral reefs pop and crackle with life. But soundscapes can decay just as ecosystems can. Degraded reefs are hushed deserts. Since the 1960s, shipping and mining have raised background noise in the oceans by about three decibels a decade. Humpback whale song occupies the same low-frequency bandwidth as deep-sea dredging and drilling for the rare earths that are vital for electronic devices. Ironically, mining the minerals we need to communicate cancels out whales' voices. Humpback whale songs are incredible vocal performances, sometimes lasting up to 24 hours. 'Song' is apt: they seem to include rhymed phrases, and their compositions travel the oceans with them, evolving as they go in a process called 'song revolutions', where a new cycle replaces the old. (Imagine if Nina Simone or the Beatles had erased their back catalogue with every new release.) They're crucial to migration and breeding seasons. But in today's louder soundscape, whale song is crowded out of its habitual bandwidth and even driven to silence – from up to 1.2 km away from commercial ships, humpback whales will cease singing rather than compete with the noise. In interspecies translation, sound only takes us so far. Animals communicate via an array of visual, chemical, thermal and mechanical cues, inhabiting worlds of perception very different to ours. Can we really understand what sound means to echolocating animals, for whom sound waves can be translated visually? The German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll called these impenetrable worlds umwelten. To truly translate animal language, we would need to step into that animal's umwelt – and then, what of us would be imprinted on her, or her on us? 'If a lion could talk,' writes Stephen Budiansky, revising Wittgenstein's famous aphorism in Philosophical Investigations, 'we probably could understand him. He just would not be a lion any more.' We should ask, then, how speaking with other beings might change us. Talking to another species might be very like talking to alien life. It's no coincidence that Ceti echoes Nasa's Seti – Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – Institute. In fact, a Seti team recorded the whup/throp exchange, on the basis that learning to speak with whales may help us if we ever meet intelligent extraterrestrials. In Denis Villeneuve's movie Arrival, whale-like aliens communicate via a script in which the distinction between past, present and future times collapses. For Louise, the linguist who translates the script, learning Heptapod lifts her mind out of linear time and into a reality in which her own past and future are equally available. The film mentions Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic determinism – the idea that our experience of reality is encoded in language – to explain this. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was dismissed in the mid-20th century, but linguists have since argued that there may be some truth to it. Pormpuraaw speakers in northern Australia refer to time moving from east to west, rather than forwards or backwards as in English, making time indivisible from the relationship between their body and the land. Whale songs are born from an experience of time that is radically different to ours. Humpbacks can project their voices over miles of open water; their songs span the widest oceans. Imagine the swell of oceanic feeling on which such sounds are borne. Speaking whale would expand our sense of space and time into a planetary song. I imagine we'd think very differently about polluting the ocean soundscape so carelessly. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Where it counts, we are perfectly able to understand what nature has to say; the problem is, we choose not to. As incredible as it would be to have a conversation with another species, we ought to listen better to what they are already telling us. David Farrier is the author of Nature's Genius: Evolution's Lessons for a Changing Planet (Canongate). Why Animals Talk by Arik Kershenbaum (Viking, £10.99) Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wiley-Blackwell, £24.95) An Immense World by Ed Yong (Vintage, £12.99)
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
‘Greedy' fishermen blamed for driving whales from Irish coast
A whale-watching boss has blamed overfishing for driving cetaceans away from the Irish coast as he announced his firm was going out of business. Colin Barnes announced the closure of Cork Whale Watch after 25 years in business, saying 'greedy fishermen' had ruined what used to be a premier wildlife destination. He said overfishing on the south coast by large trawlers meant sprat fish, the main food source for whales, had been fished almost to extinction, driving the humpbacks and other species elsewhere in search of food. 'Sadly, our world-class whale watching is now a thing of the past. A small number of greedy fishermen with huge trawlers have overfished the sprats to the point of near extinction,' Mr Barnes wrote on social media. 'There is nothing left for the whales to prey upon so they have moved on in search of prey elsewhere.' Mr Barnes, who has 53 years of experience in Irish waters and started his whale-watching business after leaving commercial fishing, said the change has been dramatic. He explained commercial trawlers fish for sprat in September and October when they are spawning. The fish pack themselves together and allows the fishermen to catch vast quantities of them at the same time. Mr Barnes said the depletion of stocks was an 'ecological disaster'. 'At the start of our first season in 2001 it became very clear to me that we had world-class whale watching in the waters off the West Cork coastline, featuring 3 species of baleen whales, fin, humpback and minke whales amongst huge numbers of common dolphins,' Mr Barnes added in his post. 'All we have now in our search area is just a few minke whales and small groups of dolphins, and over the last couple of years our trips have become totally disappointing.' Mr Barnes said whale activity peaked in November 2004 when a massive sprat shoal brought together what he estimated as 75 fin whales, 15 humpbacks and 150 to 200 minke whales 'amongst common dolphins in thousands'. 'There was never again such a gathering of so many cetaceans since then,' he said. Mr Barnes told The Irish Times: 'I've given it up in disgust. There is loads of plankton but the bird life is gone and the fish are gone. It's an empty, lifeless sea.' Sprat, small sardine-like fish, are crucial to the marine food web, but increased demand for fishmeal from fish farms has intensified commercial fishing of the species. The closure of Mr Barnes's business has prompted Irish government officials to promise action. Christopher O'Sullivan, the minister responsible for nature and biodiversity, said measures must be introduced 'to protect this forage species, not just for whales, but for all the other fish stocks and wildlife that depend on it – to prevent the collapse of an entire food web.' Mr O'Sullivan said Ireland hopes to emulate UK restrictions on sprat fishing, which have shown positive effects. Mark Gannon, who operates Atlantic Whale and Wildlife Tours from Courtmacsherry, agreed with Mr Barnes and said there was a severe decline in wildlife off the coast of Ireland due to overfishing. 'It's a devastating form of fishing,' Mr Gannon said. 'It's like a farmer taking all the grass out of his fields and expecting his cows to thrive.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
3 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
‘Greedy' fishermen blamed for driving whales from Irish coast
A whale-watching boss has blamed overfishing for driving cetaceans away from the Irish coast as he announced his firm was going out of business. Colin Barnes announced the closure of Cork Whale Watch after 25 years in business, saying 'greedy fishermen' had ruined what used to be a premier wildlife destination. He said overfishing on the south coast by large trawlers meant sprat fish, the main food source for whales, had been fished almost to extinction, driving the humpbacks and other species elsewhere in search of food. 'Sadly, our world-class whale watching is now a thing of the past. A small number of greedy fishermen with huge trawlers have overfished the sprats to the point of near extinction,' Mr Barnes wrote on social media. 'There is nothing left for the whales to prey upon so they have moved on in search of prey elsewhere.' Mr Barnes, who has 53 years of experience in Irish waters and started his whale-watching business after leaving commercial fishing, said the change has been dramatic. He explained commercial trawlers fish for sprat in September and October when they are spawning. The fish pack themselves together and allows the fishermen to catch vast quantities of them at the same time. Mr Barnes said the depletion of stocks was an 'ecological disaster'. 'At the start of our first season in 2001 it became very clear to me that we had world-class whale watching in the waters off the West Cork coastline, featuring 3 species of baleen whales, fin, humpback and minke whales amongst huge numbers of common dolphins,' Mr Barnes added in his post. 'All we have now in our search area is just a few minke whales and small groups of dolphins, and over the last couple of years our trips have become totally disappointing.' Mr Barnes said whale activity peaked in November 2004 when a massive sprat shoal brought together what he estimated as 75 fin whales, 15 humpbacks and 150 to 200 minke whales 'amongst common dolphins in thousands'. 'There was never again such a gathering of so many cetaceans since then,' he said. Mr Barnes told The Irish Times: 'I've given it up in disgust. There is loads of plankton but the bird life is gone and the fish are gone. It's an empty, lifeless sea.' Sprat, small sardine-like fish, are crucial to the marine food web, but increased demand for fishmeal from fish farms has intensified commercial fishing of the species. The closure of Mr Barnes's business has prompted Irish government officials to promise action. Christopher O'Sullivan, the minister responsible for nature and biodiversity, said measures must be introduced 'to protect this forage species, not just for whales, but for all the other fish stocks and wildlife that depend on it – to prevent the collapse of an entire food web.' Mr O'Sullivan said Ireland hopes to emulate UK restrictions on sprat fishing, which have shown positive effects. Mark Gannon, who operates Atlantic Whale and Wildlife Tours from Courtmacsherry, agreed with Mr Barnes and said there was a severe decline in wildlife off the coast of Ireland due to overfishing. 'It's a devastating form of fishing,' Mr Gannon said. 'It's like a farmer taking all the grass out of his fields and expecting his cows to thrive.'
Irish Times
3 days ago
- Health
- Irish Times
Why are Ireland's whales disappearing?
Aren't huge whales always being spotted off Ireland's coast? Skipper Colin Barnes, who gave up commercial fishing in 2001 to set up one of Ireland's first whale -watching businesses, has said the whales have left his search area of ocean off Cork because the sprat they feed on have been fished to near extinction. He could no longer offer 'world-class whale-watching'. This decline contrasts with evidence of a rich mix of cetaceans increasingly found off Ireland including whales, dolphins and porpoises. There is no doubt some are here more frequently due to changes in water temperature caused by global warming or having to go further afield due to overfishing elsewhere. But declaring the territorial waters of Ireland a designated whale and dolphin sanctuary in 1991 helped. This coincided with an increase in numbers following an international ban on killing whales introduced in the 1980s. READ MORE [ 'It's an empty, lifeless sea': Whales leave Cork waters, putting watchers out of business Opens in new window ] It fostered a new form of ecotourism, centring on Ireland's rich marine biodiversity, though some occasionally encroached too close to these magnificent creatures. To see a fin whale, the second largest mammal in the world, almost on our doorstep was awe-inspiring. A humpback whale swims off the coast of west Cork accompanied by a common dolphin in 2021. Photograph: Nick Pfeiffer/Provision Why are sprats so important? Sprats are small fish indigenous to Ireland and a rich protein source for whales but also other cetaceans and seabirds. They dominate the inshore coastline in the Celtic Sea at shallow depths, making them especially vulnerable when trawlers fish for them at spawning stage from October on with no limits on catch. Deep-sea cameraman Ken O'Sullivan has described this as 'ecological suicide' when there is little data on the species, adding that the precautionary principle should apply. Moreover, it is not a commercial catch with most sprat sold to fish farms as fishmeal. [ Shining new light on sperm whales and the importance of Irish waters to them Opens in new window ] Barnes claimed Government apathy and inaction towards fish conservation, however, has led to the demise of the fish by just a handful of large trawlers in Irish waters. What can be done about it? At a recent public meeting in west Cork there were calls for a ban on sprat fishing in inshore coastal waters. In 2019, government efforts to introduce a ban were successfully challenged in the courts. In 2024, a public consultation invited views on introducing the ban again. It attracted more than 5,500 submissions, but campaigners say more than a year on nothing has happened. Minister of State with responsibility for nature and biodiversity, Cork South West TD Christopher O'Sullivan, has accepted the need to 'introduce measures to protect this forage species – not just for whales, but for all the other fish stocks and wildlife that depend on it – to prevent the collapse of an entire food web". Marine ecologists and those in the whale watching business believe a strictly enforced ban cannot come soon enough.
