Digital Dolittles: Talking to the animals?

24:36of application. That means quicker results, saving you both time and money. Our knowledgeable team is ready to help bring your dreams to life one gallon at a time. Stop by your local Menards today.

24:51Self-directed investing, trading, full-service wealth management, automated investing, financial planning, thematic investing, retirement planning. Phew. And to think, that's just a small taste of what Schwab offers. Because Schwab knows that when it comes to your finances, choice matters. No matter your goals, investing style, life stage or experience, Schwab has everything you need, all in one place, so you can invest your way. Visit schwab.com to learn more. Support comes from WISE, the smart way to manage the currencies you need around the globe. Fed up with losing out to hidden fees when you send money abroad with your everyday bank?

25:32Choose the smart way. Wise. You can count on the exchange rate you'd usually find on Google. No unwelcome surprises. Plus, ditch that where's my money feeling. Most transfers arrive in under 20 seconds. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees. Be smart. Get wise. Download the Wise app today. T's and C's apply.

25:57You're listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Maria Margaronis. We've been on the wing with bats and in the African rainforest with elephants. Now we're diving deep into the ocean where the biggest creatures on the planet are to be found and possibly the biggest breakthroughs in understanding animal communication. Bet you didn't know they're using AI to talk to whales. We're not yet at the point where we can parlay with pachyarderms or discuss Eastern art and dramas with intellectual llamas. There's still so much we don't understand here on Earth. And that's what's inspired me to create this challenge.

26:362025 was the inaugural year of the$100 ,000 Collar Doolittle Prize, given for establishing two-way communication with another species. There's big money and hope and hype buzzing around the idea of decoding animal communication through AI. But is that actually possible? And how did we get here? The idea that other animals have consciousness, let alone language, was controversial well into the 20th century. But in 1970, bioacoustics, public empathy and conservation came together with the unlikeliest of hit records, Songs of the Humpback Whales.

27:19Those otherworldly sounds were collected by biologist Roger Payne and his then wife Katie, the same Katie who went on to study elephants. Though some scientists balked at the term songs, the whales' expressive voices startled and moved their listeners and helped to launch the Save the Whales movement. Even now, that recording is heading out beyond our galaxy on the Voyager space probe to tell the universe about life on Earth. Now, powerful hydrophones and digital recorders are opening our ears to more noises from the deep sea and aiding conservation in practical ways in a realm where sound reigns supreme.

27:56There are vast parts of the ocean that are completely dark. Unless you're in those surface waters, vision is just not going to help you. Any kind of animal that lives in the deep is going to be relying on sound. Dr. Anna Shirovich, a marine bioacoustician at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Now we have the ability to listen to everything in the ocean. When I told my sister I was going to study fish sounds, she looked at me like I was crazy. It's like, fish make sounds? Yeah, that's the cool thing about fish. You can actually hear just about all the fish sounds. Some of them do it when they gather for spawning, where they'll all come together and basically sing.

28:39Anna's working life's been transformed by advances in bioacoustics. These days, she says, she doesn't get out of bed for less than a terabyte of data collected by her deep-sea recording devices. Practically, we are throwing tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of euros over the side of the ship. And you leave it on the ocean floor for a year. And then the next big question is, did it record? When you see that there is data there, and then sometimes maybe you'll see even calls from whales or fish or whatever, that's a good day. She's still surprised by some of the bloops and croaks and squeaks she pulls up from the seabed.

29:17After all, we've only explored about 5 % of the ocean. The thing that gets me really excited is when I'm going through recordings and I hear and find things that we have not heard before. There's so much that we don't know. One of my interests and passions is trying to get long-term records so that we can see how are things changing over time. We have been able to document some really strange things that we don't fully understand, and I'm hoping that we will. The pitch of the song of blue whales has been gradually decreasing over time. So they're basically calling deeper and deeper and deeper.

29:54The explanation that I'm thinking about currently came from talking to people, studying music. They told me that what humans do when you're singing in a choir is that you tend to get flat. And I think that this is what's happening to the whales. they're all super highly tuned. One population of blue whales is going to be singing at the exact same pitch. So they're listening to each other and somehow able to match each other. And I think it's through that process that they are maybe inadvertently just lowering their pitch over time. I don't really have proof for this yet.

30:30We are now a palpable presence in that deep, dark blue. These songs are from a submarine's propeller.

30:41Intrusive human sounds now vibrate through the oceans too, disturbing and disorienting marine life. Shipping is constant lower intensity but continuous noise. Like, you know, living next to a highway maybe. We're constantly exposed to these lower levels. But then there's other types of sounds in the ocean, like pile driving or seismic surveys that produce what are called impulsive sounds, which are really high intensity but much shorter duration, comparable to if you're walking down the street and there's a jackhammer, right? Animals have different responses. The best, most notorious examples are of whales that have ended up stranded as a result of exposure to naval sonar that some species of whales are very sensitive to.

31:28Anna is now collaborating with WhaleSafe, which successfully reduces ship strikes on large whales off the California coast through a combination of bioacoustics, observation and data analysis.

31:43The voices of sea animals have always resonated through the paddles of indigenous hunters, the hulls of wooden ships and the taut ropes of harpoons sunk into stricken whales. Some sailors thought that they heard mermaids singing. But the big breakthroughs in underwater acoustics came with the Cold War, when a multi-billion dollar undersea arms race seeded the ocean floor with listening devices.

32:10The oceans cover seven-tenths of the world's surface and in places reach a depth of six miles. A huge world of water, over and through which moves every kind of creature and thing. Some of the things are the Navy's own, and some belong to foreign powers. There's been a long and ongoing interaction between military and naval research and our research field. Dr Luke Rendell of the University of St Andrews has been listening to whales for decades. A massive part of all underwater warfare is trying to figure out where your adversary is. Check your ability to recognise underwater sound. Write down the sound or sounds that you hear.

32:53Be as specific as possible. The first time a fin whale was recorded by the US Navy, I am told, they freaked out. You know, it was so regular that they were utterly convinced it was some kind of machine. And they had these amazing flights of paranoia about what kind of thing the Russians could have built that would make this noise on the seabed. And were we about to lose the Cold War and that kind of thing? And then scientists listened to it and said, actually, that's a fin whale. It's not the Russians. My first job after my undergraduate was actually a research assistant to produce a database of cetacean vocalizations specifically to train submarine sonar operators so that they would be able to say, pretty sure that's a blue whale I'm not going to need to torpedo that Luke went on to do a PhD on sperm whale communication Sperm whales don't sing like humpbacks they click in sequences biologists call coders.

33:53Here he is explaining in a 2018 BBC programme. In the Mediterranean, sperm whales make coders that sound like this.

34:08In the Caribbean, they make coders that sound like this.

34:16And just those differences in the patterning of the clicks actually signal which group the whales belong to.

34:32I actually think if there's a meaning to the sperm whale, it means home. It means this is where I belong. I am with the group into which I was born and I am safe here. Luke understood that sperm whales learn their coders from the group they're born into, which changed the way he thought about their social life. I quickly realised that different social groups of sperm whales had different vocal dialects. And of course, that's very hard to explain by anything other than they learn the dialects of their groups that they grow up in. And so once I had sort of documented that system, the question of, well, why is it there, leads you directly to the idea of cultural transmission and learning of dialects as you develop, as you grow up in a particular sperm whale social unit.

35:16When Luke and his PhD supervisor Hal Whitehead published their paper claiming that sperm whales have culture back in 2001, they were dismissed as radical outliers, both by some biologists and by anthropologists who argued that the word culture can only apply to humans.

35:38As evolutionary biologists, we consider culture to be behaviour or information that is learned socially from others and becomes typical of a particular group or a community over time. You know, we think that there's stuff going on in cetaceans, in whales and dolphins that also fits into this debate and should be considered. Because it was crossing a line, the notion that a non-human or an animal could have something that deserved the same name was at that time controversial. I think that's changed in the last 20 years. It certainly has. What do humans have to gain from a conversation with a sperm whale?

36:17In cutting-edge AI, they're decoding the complex language of sperm whale. Sounds like sci-fi, right? At 230 decibels, they're the loudest animal, and some researchers have even said their most potent clicks could vibrate a person to death. The hope is that one day, for the first time, we'll be able to have full conversations. And with AI, we're just getting started on unlocking the mysteries of non-human languages. It has the capacity to bring us closer to the natural world. It's like a whole new frontier. It is a whole new frontier. The mission is quite simple, to listen to and to translate the voices of sperm whales so we can understand their world deeper.

36:55That's David Gruber, founder and director of CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, a non-profit scientific and conservation project. If we could just spend the time and energy just appreciating a sperm whale, an animal that was vilified that now we're seeing has much more complicated of a system than we ever imagined and kind of just bringing everyone on this journey. David's an evolutionary biologist. His research has run the gamut from bacteria to corals to jellyfish to sharks to sperm whales. You could say he swims in the same waters as Roger Payne, whom he counts as one of his mentors.

37:33In one sense, we've already been talking to the whales with our sounds of our boats. we've been making a lot of noise and I don't feel that we have anything particular of you know wisdom that we need to tell the whales so that's why it's mostly about listening to them we're not trying to have the whales speak English we're not having them try to play a keyboard or you know have some kind of human interface like this is about translating their voices and as anonymous as we can be. That journey began in 2018 when David's curiosity about the undersea world swam head-on into AI. I was listening in my office to sperm whale sounds and across the hall was Shafi Goldwasser, cryptographer from MIT.

38:21But she came in and she got really interested in these sounds, you know, because there were clicks. She was leading a machine learning working group and many of the folks were involved in Google Translate at the time. She was talking about these new techniques of translation and especially some of these techniques that are at the forefront now of like ChatGP3, looking for patterns in multi-dimensional space and trying to predict the next word. We did a study. Can we predict the next click? They could. So we knew that the tools that had just opened up could be interesting in studying sperm whale vocalizations.

38:59The data for SETI's algorithms come from biologist Shane Gero, who's been studying and recording sperm whale families in the deep clear waters of Dominica in the Caribbean for more than 20 years. Here he is explaining how machine learning is changing our understanding of sperm whale clicks at the not-for-profit Bioneers Conference in 2024. What the machines have done quite rapidly is open up multiple new dimensions within an individual call, within a click for sperm whales, where there is the potential for variation. So what we used to say was a 1 plus 1 plus 3, there's now four different types of 1 plus 1 plus 3, and they seem to be used in different contexts.

39:41It's not going to be Google Translate next week, and there's all sorts of reasons for that. But what it will do is give the whales a bit more credit in terms of literally defining the complexity of the information that they're sharing with each other, simply because we weren't paying attention. So, as with elephants, as with bats, the capacity to collect and analyze more data is deepening our sense of whales' communication and social lives. But SETI is going further and deeper. There's just so many questions that we're interested in learning. There's so many new technologies that we're beginning to use.

40:16We're beginning to use a glider system that can follow from a distance, a mother and calf, because the linguists are very interested in looking at language acquisition. And baby whales go through a sense of babbling before they click into their natal coda dialect. Bioacoustics and AI offer a deeper understanding of life than we've had before. And I think we're in for a really exciting time, learning more and more elements of their communication system. And we like to think that we're like baby whales at this point. We're now just picking up our first words. Hmm. First words is obviously a metaphor.

40:53But Project SETI often uses terms from human language like alphabet and vowels, as if they literally apply to whales, which gets the media very excited. So next time you think of the ocean, remember, it's not just water. It's a world of conversation waiting for us to tune in. SETI's multidisciplinary team includes roboticists, cryptographers, underwater acousticians, and many varieties of machine learning engineers. The ultimate goal is to build a universal translator that can crack any communication system. David is definitely aiming for the stars. There will need to be new tools and new ways of looking at this, and they could also be applied across species, and they could also be applied if we were to meet life in another galaxy.

41:39So So it's kind of nice in a way because even this thinking process of journey is something that goes way beyond whales and even possibly beyond our galaxy.

41:56It's a thrilling, tantalizing idea. But Luke Rendell, who made the once controversial argument that sperm whales have culture, remains skeptical about the claim that their communication is comparable to human language. Why does it attract people? Well, whales are already charismatic animals, right? I understand that myself. I've spent a lot of time with them in the field and I would not be doing the job I do if I didn't think they were incredible creatures and I wanted to know more about them. So I totally get that. There's a weird mystery of them being so related to us as mammals that you can see when you look in their eyes.

42:30And then we've always been quite lonely as a species. So we have this language and we think we're great, but we'd really like someone else to talk to for some reason and that's a deep question about human psychology that I describe as a kind of cosmic loneliness, right? Not only do we look out to the stars, we're enchanted by the idea that maybe there's some really clever stuff going on and we just haven't figured out how to access it. And the reason SETI exists is actually that notion is particularly catnip to people who've made money out of technology and would really love for that technology to do something good in the world.

43:07And I just think that notion is irresistible. In a way, the old relationship between bioacoustics and the military has morphed into a symbiosis with Silicon Valley. AI developers like Google DeepMind and Microsoft are putting serious money into biological projects, hoping to reap the benefits in ever more powerful AI. The potential upsides for research and conservation are enormous, But there is a risk that the AI tail might start to wag the biological dog, privileging new algorithms over genuine insight into living things. One of the things that really lit the fire for me when it came to arguing for use of the word culture was the evidence.

43:48We had a lot of evidence gathered together over the years that all pointed in the same direction. We have virtually zero of that kind of evidence for the notion that sperm whales have a complex language. A lot of claims are being made on a very flimsy, evidentiary basis. What do you mean by communication? If you think communication is just an exchange of information or signals, then I think we've long ago established that. The AI industry is built on language models, but we don't have to look at other species' communication through that possibly anthropocentric lens. Luke has his own theory about the function of sperm whale coders, which brings us back to the songs of the sea.

44:26I actually think that there may be deep commonalities between the synchronous performance of coders with members of your social group and similar phenomena in human societies, whether it's song, dance, clapping, everything from Morris dancing to whatever you want to call it, and just clapping rhythms and drumming together. And when we do that with a group of people, we generally feel a bit more connected to them afterwards. Maybe music is a better metaphor than language. I'm really interested in animal minds, not just in cognition, not just in communication. I'm interested in the experience they have.

45:03What is it like to be that entity? Of course, if we follow these philosophers, we'll never be able to really understand that. But we can try. And so that's kind of what motivates me here. Professor Vincent Yannick, also at St. Andrews, is part of the team that won this year's inaugural Collodoolittle Challenge to Prove Interspecies Communication with a study of bottlenose dolphins. One of the reasons why people focus on dolphins is because there is this idea that dolphins are these special creatures in the sea that have skills that other animals don't have. That combination of cognitive skills and the ability to learn sounds from others.

45:35They basically rival the great apes in their cognitive skills. Bottle-noves dolphins have preferred other individuals that they spend time with. And that's similar to our social structure. And quite a complex social structure because you've got to remember everyone and you've got to remember your history with them and what your relationship is with them. Dolphin's complex social lives suggest the need for complex communication. When I started out studying Boronov's dolphin communication, the so-called signature whistle has already been discovered and described. That's where each individual develops its own specific sound that it then uses throughout its life to broadcast its identity to others.

46:15It's often been compared to a name because it's learned and it's different between all animals. And that can be used by the owner of that signal, but it's also used by others to address the individual. These name-like calls pose a philosophical question about what's going on in dolphins' minds. Can they connect the whistle with the dolphin belongs to? You're sort of asking, can I imagine my friend? Can I think about my friend? Even perhaps when they're not there. Even if there's no input, exactly. So do we think that dolphins can do that? They do have that independent representation, yes. So dolphins connect the thought of a friend or family member with a learned sound that has a shared meaning.

46:56That's one of the prerequisites for language. But even if we can keep decoding dolphin communication, Vincent doesn't think we'll necessarily be able to talk to them or any other species. If you talk about talking to animals, then I always kind of got to ask you back is what you want to ask them. Do you want to ask them what's their favorite color? and you will see that you very quickly come to this question of their mind and how do they represent their environment. What a layperson perhaps thinks is that I just have to learn dolphin in the same way as I have to learn French. Animals will not have anything that's like that because they don't have our sensory makeup, they don't have our biology and so therefore whatever communication they have, it is different.

47:37We have no ultrasonic ears, no fins, no blowhole. We don't know what it feels like to live in water. Remember Kate Jones' bat detective? That opened up a world to which I'm usually oblivious, sharing the air with me. But I'll never know what it's like to be a bat. I think there's no doubt that there is interspecies communication. Of course, everyone's communicating with their pet. Hey, you puss, I love you. The real question is, like, how complex can that get? You need two minds that can actually relate to each other. You know, we can't see ultraviolet, for example. Other animals can. So to them, two things that look identical to us, to them have different colors.

48:17Our cognition isn't something that is detached from our bodies and is just kind of floating there and we're with these kind of genius minds. It's very closely linked to the makeup of our bodies and our sensory system.

48:34Once, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, If a lion could speak, we could not understand him. Our minds are fleshly things, embodied, shaped by our senses and our biological needs, which are different from other species. AI has no body at all, and while some say that frees it from our animal limitations, I wonder if it can truly translate what living, breathing creatures are communicating. What it is doing is transforming bioacoustic research and conservation for elephants, bats, whales, and some of the smallest living things in the sea. Over a third of all marine life is actually living on coral reefs.

49:14They're very threatened. We've lost over 50 % of the world's reefs in the last 70 years, and of course, the outlook going forward is even worse. So urgent action is needed to try and turn that around. Ben Williams is finishing a PhD using bioacoustics and AI to understand coral reef habitats. We know that reef organisms are attracted to the reef by the sound. So in the first few days of life, they drift out into the open ocean, they develop here, and then a couple of weeks later, they return to the reef. And the first cue that they use to return to the reef is that they actually listen out for it.

49:49And when we say they hear, would it be more accurate to say they feel the sound? They're certainly sensing these vibrations in the water that tell them if this is a reef that sounds worth visiting or if one over here is not a good direction to go. A few of them make it through and settle onto that reef and begin growing. Ben's colleague Tim Lamont has shown that sound can help to attract fish and coral polyps back to dying reefs in Indonesia. Tim had recordings from the Great Barrier Reef prior to all these degradation events that took hold and then also had recordings post the degradation. And these are quite different sound signatures.

50:27And what he did was around many areas surrounding this island, he brought together bits of coral rubble and rock and built a small mound a few dozen centimetres high and wide. And on all of these, he put an underwater speaker. So these are actually the ones that are used by synchronised swimmers in swimming pools. And then these were blasting out the sound of healthy reefs, degraded reefs. And then there was a set just playing silence. They were controls in the experiment. And what the team found was that on those where the sound of healthy reefs was being played, They got double the amount of fish return and a 50 % increase in the diversity of fish that were coming here.

51:03The reef sound mattered in where these fish were choosing to settle down. Ben freedives without oxygen tanks. He says you can move faster and hear more that way as you swim through an underwater garden coming back to vibrant life. Swimming over this rubble, all these dead pieces of coral lying everywhere that form this mat like a moonscape, pretty devoid of life and then as you get closer you hear this sound so this crackle in the distance you start to see all these jagged shapes of a different coral sticking out from the ocean floor and then you see the coral and you see what's come back and the beauty and the color of it begins to hit you and then you see small fish darting in and out of these of course you get close some of them swim away some of them come to see what you're doing there seeing that come from nothing.

51:52It almost brings tears to your eyes.

52:11I began this project dreaming that we might one day be able to talk to other species, like Dr Doolittle. But even if we humans are the only language animal, that doesn't mean we're alone. The revolutions in bioacoustics and AI are bringing us closer to other animals. They might even help to knock us off our anthropocentric perch and repair some of the damage we've done to the rest of the living world. You've been listening to the documentary from the BBC World Service. I'm Maria Margaronis, the producer was Mark Berman, and this was a Storiescape production.

52:50you