Can AI help us speak with wolves? | Jeffrey T. Reed

0:06You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. I've got a nine-month-old golden retriever puppy at home, and I cannot tell you how many times a day I wish I could understand what he's trying to say to me. Well, understanding our dogs and conversing with dolphins and deciphering whale song, howling with wolves. At one point, this was all the stuff of fantasy. But with the help of AI, we may actually be closer to understanding animal conversations. In this dynamic talk, software engineer and wolf whisperer Jeffrey T.

0:44Reed shares what he's learned about wolf communication, its vast implications for how we understand and interact with the world around us, and reveal some exciting discoveries that you'll just have to hear to find out.

1:00So good morning, everybody. My name is... Ooh! But I'm about to play you a real wolf's howl. Not just any old wolf, this wolf was called 907. The typical wolf in Yellowstone National Park only lives three and a half years. 907 was 11 and had one eye when she howled like this for over 30 minutes to her packmates five miles away. Close your eyes and just listen.

1:53With the help of AI, we're trying to decode the wolfhowl and rethink how to protect and promote the world's last wild places. This was 907. She was the matriarch of the Junction Butte pack, but I like to call her the one I'd wonder. And this was me 50 years ago with my family in Yellowstone. There are three reasons you pee your pants. One, you're getting old. Like none of us in this room, right? Two, you're too young to know better. Or three, in my case, it was my first experience watching wildlife in one of America's grandest ideas, Yellowstone National Park and public lands. My buddies and I grew up hiking, hunting and fishing the Absorke Mountains of my Montana youth, and where whiskey is for drinking, but water and wolves are sometimes for fighting.

2:47Wolves were killed off in Yellowstone in the 1920s, reintroduced in 1995, and now contribute to over a half-a-billion-dollar annual tourism economy where I live. Now, recently, the media has been talking a lot about the use of artificial intelligence to decode animal communication, from elephants to bats and everything in between. And a few of us are doing it with one of the most iconic sounds of the wild.

3:22In order to decode wolfish, my company works with Yellowstone scientists to build Autonomous Recording Units, or ARUs. These battery-operated devices use AI to record only the sound and motion that matters to the scientist, saving them time and money. But they can do a lot of other things, like tell me the precise location of a sound. For example, the where and when of a poacher's gunshot. Last year, researchers hiked into the backcountry to place SARUs all across the greater Yellowstone, including one near this wolf den site, to study wolf communication. Wolves have over 20 different call types, including barks, yelps, whimpers, whines, moans, woas, and even teeth clacking.

4:08And they're one of a few species who collectively communicate in what's called a chorus howl. Now, the pups first hear this dictionary of sounds at their birth dens, and so we departed. And one month later, the pack arrived, and the pregnant alpha female claimed the den. Her nose is poking out of the den, and she's taking a well-deserved pregnancy nap. Now, three months later, I created this visual representation of every sound recorded at the den site for the month of July. And AI looks for patterns in this data, and the ARUs don't sleep at night, so they were able to record all of these wolf howls.

4:46But a howl isn't just a howl. These are spectrograms of 50 individual wolf howls. A spectrogram simply visualizes sound, and your eyes and AI can see patterns in them. Here's the howl from just one of those wolves.

5:05And here's all 50 wolf howls at the same time.

5:17Software algorithms help us find signal in that noise. And researchers have already determined that wolves can identify one another just from their howls. But we do not know yet if they have names like Teddy or Rachel, or if it's more like you picking up the phone and recognizing that person's voice on the other end. Now, a howl basically means, here I am. Where are you? But we've found five functions for different types of howls, including this one, which is used in context of distress.

5:53Now, this is where it gets interesting to me. A chorus howl is when a pack or family of wolves communicate as a group, often to signal that this is their territory. A wolf from the pack is off-camera howling, but being totally ignored by his packmates until something happens.

6:17As soon as the alpha female howled, the rest of the wolves looked at her, and the chorus began. She was the conductor of this chorus. And as it kicks off, the wolves come together in this mosh pit of dancing bodies making different types of calls. But some of the wolves, especially females, use a particular type of howl called a woa, and we think it's to strengthen family bonds. It's a wolf's version of I Love You, but it sounds like this.

6:52The entire event lasts about 60 seconds and then everybody goes about their business. This is what a chorus howl looks like when 11 wolves from the same pack howl at the same time. And I don't know about you, but to me, it looks like an angry doctor's signature, but not to the wolves. We've learned that wolves from one pack can count or estimate the number of wolves howling in a rival pack without seeing them, and they make a decision. If they're outnumbered, they typically run for the hills. If not, they often approach that rival pack. We're using technology from Google DeepMind to see if we can count wolves just from audio recordings and improve census estimates of wildlife.

7:34Now, wolves also bark, like your dog. But unlike most dogs, wolves combine barks with other sounds into sentence-like structures. And in this video, a female wolf uses a bark howl after being chased and nearly killed by a rival pack. The barks in alarm and loosely translated means stranger danger, and the modulated howl send backup.

8:07These secretive devices are teaching us that wolves communicate a lot in close quarters. We recently put a tiny air ewe on the first wild wolf ever and learned that she likes to vocalize roughly half as much as a typical American speaks in a given day. And here's just a sampling of the sounds they make.

8:45I love those mini howls. They make a lot more of those than we ever knew. They're close-range contact calls. So remember the alpha female taking a nap by her den? 25 days later, her pup stepped outside the den, raised its tiny three-inch snout, and howled beside Mom.

9:14With the help of AI, we're learning more about why wolves howl, including that your dog might be barking at that emergency vehicle because it matches the pitch of a wolf pup. Now, look, I don't know if AI will ultimately decode animal communication. Wolfish is not the same thing as English, but I do know this, there has to be animals to decode. If your body represented the total weight of all the world's land mammals today, your right forearm would be what's left of the wild ones. The rest of your body is us, our livestock, and our pets. As for carnivores, things like lions, tigers, and wolves, it's less than my pinky.

9:56The challenge we collectively face as real humans, not artificial ones, goes far beyond individual opinions on wild wolves. It's about the future of wildness itself for hunter like me and non-hunter alike. So we're going to close with a group chorus, Hal. No practice, and the next time you're at a party, I want you to down a shot of whiskey and try this. Now, here's a tip. Use the vowel ooh as in boot. Wait till I count to three, and I'm going to tune up your voices with this recently rediscovered recording from 1995. These are the first wild wolf howls in Yellowstone after 70 years of silence.

10:55Ready? One, two, three.

11:14Well done. Thank you.

11:24That was Jeffrey T. Reed at TED 2025. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted.com slash curationguidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezo. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.