🍄 Call of the Wild

An estimated 8.7 million species of plants and animals co-exist with humans on the planet. If survival is about fitting in with the rest of life, does nature need a digital intervention?

Jun 09, 2023

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Hello, we’re Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declared the extinction of 160 species in the last decade. Let nature run its course - but keep technology on its trail – seems to be how we’re playing it out. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence, but all species need to work together to survive. Can humans intercept interspecies communication and decode the discourse?

‘Humanity may be on the brink of inventing a zoological version of Google Translate,’ - Karen Bakker, author of ‘The Sound of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the World of Animals and Plants’ (Princeton University Press; 2022).

Think you’re in tune with nature? Missing a beat. From deep-sea vibrations of whales to low-frequency rumbles used by elephants to find family far away, animals secretly communicate behind closed jaws. Whales in Bermuda can hear others singing off the coast of Ireland. Honeybees jump on bloom calls, with flowers opening their petals for them to pollinate but closing them to predators. Elephants make one sound for “honeybee” – which sends the herd running - and another for “human.” Speaking with sound vibrations at frequencies we cannot hear, animals swerve tsunamis and deadly storms. Baby coral – with no apparent means of hearing or central nervous system – will swim towards a healthy reef. “If even these little creatures can hear in a manner that’s much more precise and attuned than humans, who knows what else nature is listening to,” Bakker tells Vox. What if we could pick up these signals? A turbo of new technologies introduce opportunities to decode the discourse and protect and regenerate the environment. Researchers in the fields of bioacoustics (sounds made by living organisms) and ecoacoustics (sounds made by entire ecosystems) can now sift through historic data recordings and search for patterns and missing links. Using robotics and machine learning, scientists are working on whale ‘chatbots,’ data dictionaries of East African elephants and cat apps. Zoolingua, for example, is a team of world-renowned biologists and thought leaders developing technology to communicate with dogs.

Sonics Are The New Optics

Digital technology has allowed us to listen to species on the planet. Scientists are discovering a range of species that can not only make sounds, but create sounds and respond, in synch with nature’s symphony. With these new audio tools, we are able to explore a new sonic world of interspecies communication between animals and plants.

Will eavesdropping end well? On one hand it can be used for greater good such as mitigating biodiversity loss, but the other shows cause for concern. When it comes to the manipulation of mammals, capitalism and consent, Bakker asks Google Talks: “how do we reinvent environmental regulation and governance for the digital age?”

The Beasty Noise

“The human brain is like a station on the radio dial; parked in one spot, it is deaf to all the other stations ... the animals, rocks, trees, simultaneously broadcasting across the whole spectrum of sentience.” Leroy Little Bear, Blackfoot First Nations researcher and professor emeritus at the University of Lethbridge, founding member the Native American Program at Harvard University.

Yes, you herd right. The animal kingdom is in cahoots. Humans can feel some sound through vibrations but the most meaningful audio communication happens at frequencies we can’t hear. The human ear can detect a frequency range that falls within 20 and 20,000 Hz. Whale-song can dive as low as 16 Hz, elephants use ground vibrations at around 15 Hz and mice sing so high we can’t hear it. Plants have such super-hearing that research finds they release defensive chemicals when the recorded sounds of insects chewing on their own species of plant leaves is played to them. Sound itself can be lethal to nature, though, and risk reproduction. When global shipping stopped after 9/11, the stress hormones measured in whales dropped dramatically. Fish eggs are also highly sensitive to noise from motorboats and some sea-plants (the oldest living organisms on earth) are being destroyed by noise pollution from the oil and gas industries’ deep-sea mining.

Bat URL

At 45,000 Hz to 70,000 Hz, humans can’t hear the piercing and high-pitched ultrasound of echolocation that helps bats navigate. Even if we could, it’s too fast to keep up with, which is where AI comes in. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have translated 15,000 calls of Egyptian fruit bats into several specific messages, using machine-learning algorithm. By recognizing bat’s intonations and the messages they were trying to convey, —more than 60 percent were arguments about food, sleep positions, invasion of personal space, and unwanted advances.

Bees The Greatest Dancer

Moves made by honeybees when they find a new nectar source have been named ‘the waggle dance.’ Making a ‘beeline’ back to the hive, the nectar-finding bee performs a dance to fellow bees, through speed and direction to where the new nectar source lies. Next, the bees debate on whether it’s a decent suggestion. It’s where the term ‘hive mind’ comes from, to bee - or not to bee? Those who agree join in the waggle dance.

Honey Trap

But it’s not all hun and games. The waggle dance is an example of how nature could be exploited. A research team in Germany has encoded honeybee signals into a robot that they sent into a hive. They found that the robot is able to use the honeybees’ waggle dance to communicate to the honeybees where to fly to find nectar sources. The next phase would be to implant these tiny robots into the honeybee hives so they are accepted into the community.

The Animal Word Wide Web

Interspecies Internet is a think-tank that aims to promote the cognitive abilities of species through technology. Its founders include Google’s vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist, Dr. Vint Cerf, musician Peter Gabriel and Dr. Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist, marine mammal scientist and the director of the Animal Behavior and Conservation Graduate Programs at Hunter College, CUNY. “Harnessing technology to facilitate communication with other animals and helping us decode the myriad forms of communication used by other species is a challenge that both befits humanity and benefits us in the long run,” says Reiss.

Indigenous Ideas

Another collective is also committed to advancing capacities to conduct research with animals. Spring 2023 saw The 2nd International Multispecies Methods Research Symposium, hosted by the University of Saskatchewan School of Environment and Sustainability. It brought together Indigenous Knowledge Keepers, scholars, artists, animal care providers and animal communicators in the world of animal studies. The annual academic event focuses on intuitive interspecies communication (IIC), with a purpose to share knowledge and build collaborations to support research that “furthers dialogue between animals and the more-than-human world.”

Intuitive Interspecies Communication

IIC is a non-verbal and non-physical form of communication between humans and other animals. It draws on a diversity of intuitive capacities and is actually a common communication for many people globally, including Indigenous peoples. IIC includes the mutual exchange of visceral feelings, emotions, mental impressions and thoughts, embodied sensations of touch, smell, taste, sound, as well as visuals in the mind’s eye. “Animals simply show their truths energetically, and that incoming message on my side (in a more quantum form) gets drawn up from the unconscious/intuitive reception to my conscious mind—at which point my brain will attach a mental image, word, sensation or emotion to it,” says Anna Breytenbach, a professional animal communicator trained through the Assisi International Animal Institute in California.

Where The Crows Don’t Sing

Scientists and welfare advocates now seek the same legal protection for octopuses, as lab mice and monkeys. But sometimes even best efforts to protect wildlife falls flat. A handful of endangered Hawaiian crows are locked up for their own safety. But these captive crows (raven-hued Rapunzels, if you will) are losing their ability to speak wild crow. “Their vocal repertoire may have eroded over time, which is a real conservation concern,” Christian Rutz, a behavioral ecologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, told the New York Times. “They keep them in these aviaries to breed birds for future releases. But what if these crows no longer know how to speak crow?” Rutz consults on the nonprofit Earth Species Project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to create an inventory of all the call types made by captive Hawaiian crows, which became extinct in the wild two decades ago. Historical recordings of wild Hawaiian crows can highlight any lost language – and calls deemed critical can be reintroduced to the captive colonies.

Talking of Crow Speak

In the Netflix revenge drama, Beef [2023] there’s a subtitled scene showing crows conspiring. One crow recognizes Ali Wong’s character from a previous misdemeanor and proposes they attack. “The female scared my uncle at her home,” explains the vengeful crow. This follows an earlier scene where a man brings up the Dick Cheney crow theory. “They put this dude in a Dick Cheney mask and he was mean to these crows, and the crows talked to the other crows. All over the country, no matter where Cheney was, crows would attack his ass. They’d be chirping at his face, just pecking him and shit.”

He got the facts wrong but the gist of it right. The study took place at the University of Washington, where wildlife biologists noticed that previously trapped birds seemed more wary of certain scientists walking around campus. The experiment involved researchers wearing caveman masks and trapping seven more crows while others, wearing Dick Cheney masks, were neutral. In the following months researchers wearing both masks walked around campus not bothering the crows. Those wearing caveman masks (even disguised with a hat or worn upside down) were scolded. Two years later, a researcher wearing the caveman mask was scolded by 47 of 53 crows he encountered.

Low Down And Flirty

Elephants’ mating calls have multiple deep harmonics of the same frequency, according to a study from Cornell Lab’s Elephant Listening Project. Vibrating to each other using infrasound as low as 14 Hz means humans can’t hear it (unless incredibly loud), but can feel it. Zoologist Katy Payne first discovered infrasonic communication in 1984 while observing Asian elephants at the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon. Payne realized that she could feel a thrumming vibration in the air while watching the elephants interact, and “described that feeling of elephant infrasound as a strange throbbing in her chest, a strange feeling of unease,” Bakker tells Vox. Payne later collaborated with Cornell University biologists to record the elephants for over four months and her theory that they were communicating with powerful infrasound was later confirmed by playback experiments on wild African elephants. Using autonomous sound recorders, Payne found that they used rumbles to coordinate group meetings, as well as find mates, and could reach any family member in a 50 sq.km area.

🎧 Tune into the elephant’s top trumpets. Hear forest elephants’ mating calls and test your own frequency hearing here.

Hear Pods

Zoologist Katy Payne was also instrumental in studying the songs of humpback whales. She was among the first scientists to discover that whales are composers of song after she started to record whales in Bermuda in 1968. She found that whales change their songs each season and alongside her husband, bio-acoustician Roger Payne, produced “Songs of the Humpback Whale,“ in 1970. Selling over 100,000 copies, the album helped to ban commercial whaling in the U.S. and sparked the global ‘Save the Whales’ movement.

Singing The Blues

Now there’s a new problem for the marine mammal. Changes in the ocean from climate change could be impacting the pitch in which blue and fin whales sing, according to a study in AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans. Researchers analyzed more than 1 million songs from three species of large baleen whales: fin, Antarctic blue, and three populations of pygmy blue whales, who are acoustically distinct from other whales. The researchers used six stationary underwater microphones that recorded the calls over six years, from 2010 to 2015, in the southern Indian Ocean, an area spanning roughly 3.5 million square miles.

The study attributes a falling pitch in fin whales and Madagascar pygmy blue whales to either an adjustment to the growing numbers of whales, or changes in the ocean resulting from climate change. The researchers also found that calls from blue whales in the southern Indian Ocean increase in pitch during the summer, probably to be heard over breaking sea ice.

Source: Earth Species Project

The Deep Bluetooth

The Californian nonprofit Earth Species Project, (that created the wild crow dictionary,) has also partnered with marine acoustic ecologist Michelle Fournet at the University of New Hampshire. Dr. Fournet has forayed into the communication of humpback whales by playing prerecorded whale calls using underwater speakers and reporting how they respond. The Earth Species Project scientists are now using algorithms to create new humpback whale vocalizations. These are, “new calls that don’t exist but sound like they could,” Dr. Fournet told The New York Times. “I can’t say how cool it is to imagine something from nature that isn’t there and then to listen to it.” Using machine-learning algorithms, the project will attempt to automatically identify the activity of baleen whales, based on movement data collected by tracking tags. “Is there a specific signature in the data for when an animal takes a breath or when an animal is feeding?” Ari Friedlaender, a marine ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is collaborating on the project told the NYT. They will be looking for links between behavioral data and audio recordings to see if certain movements repeatedly come with certain sounds.

“Certain aborigines of Australia have invented a way of communicating with whales that consists of wiping the sweat of the armpit with its distinct aroma and its chemicals, then speaking into one’s hand, placing it in the ocean, and sending this chemical/olfactory/ auditory message to the whales. It’s meaningful for them and they have understood that communication among whales is not visual but is by these chemical and auditory signals. Now, as far as the human language and whether human language can actually be mixed with sweat and odor and transmitted in that way? Well, why can’t it be? Why shouldn’t it be?” Constance Classen and David Howes, anthropologists, coauthors of Ways of Sensing (Routledge 2013), ALICE interview

What Else We Are Wondering

🔍 It’s All Squeak To Me
DeepSqueak is a new type of AI that decodes what mice and rats are saying by translating the vocals into sonograms, helping researchers visualize and match the different vocal pitches with behaviors and potentially moods. They are interested in discovering the psychiatric health of mice—in this case, laboratory rodents—to detect anxiety and depression. Understanding an animal’s emotional wellness through vocalization is a way by which animals can tell us how they are feeling, and ultimately, the social lives of the thirteen hundred rodent-like species.

🔍 The Truth About Cats and Dogs
Click here? By pressing recordable sound buttons, devices such as Meow Talk and FluentPet offer people a chance to communicate with their pets.

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