Behavioral Biology: The Languages ​​of Animals

Elephants are fascinating and highly intelligent animals. It is not for nothing that it is popularly said about people with a strong memory that they have a memory like an elephant. For example, researchers were able to demonstrate through experiments that elephants can recognize themselves in the mirror. An ability that a number of other species in the animal kingdom also have, such as primates, dolphins, corvids, horses and cleaner fish.

Now scientists have discovered that the pachyderms have a kind of complex language and don’t just sound off in certain situations. “Wild African elephants address each other with name-like calls, a rare ability among animals,” says a new study published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution Study by researchers at Colorado State University, Save the Elephants and Elephant Voices. They used machine learning to confirm that elephant calls contained a name-like component – something the researchers already suspected based on observations. When they played recorded calls, elephants responded positively to calls directed at them by calling back or approaching the speaker. Calls directed at other elephants elicited less response.

Dolphins and parrots call each other by “name”

“Dolphins and parrots call each other by ‘name’ by imitating the addressee’s typical call,” said lead author of the study Michael Pardo. “In contrast, our data suggest that elephants do not rely on mimicking the recipient’s calls to address each other, which is more similar to the way human names work.” George Wittemyer, head of the scientific advisory board of Save the Elephants and co-author of the study, believes that the use of arbitrary vocal labels suggests that elephants may be capable of abstract thinking.

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“Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr, Grrrrrrrr”: People only hear a deep, drawn-out rumble, but male elephants understand something like this: “Hey guys, let’s move on!” A research team in the USA has now been able to hear these go-go calls for the first time with bull elephants in Etosha National Park in Namibia in a study published in the journal “PeerJ” in July. Until now, biologists thought that only female elephants in family groups made these calls. “We were amazed that male elephants, who usually form only loose social bonds, coordinate their voices so sophisticatedly to get moving,” explains author Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell. The cops’ communication is more complex than previously assumed. The male elephants may have learned this type of communication from older female elephants.

Elephants aren’t the only animals that know some kind of language. Prairie dogs have communication that is more complex than any other animal language yet deciphered. Researchers found that their calls convey descriptive details, such as distinguishing between a variety of animals, people, and even the color a person wears.

Sperm whales combine 21 basic building blocks of click sounds

Dolphins and whales also use highly developed communication techniques. Dolphins are known to give themselves names. Sperm whales that live in groups communicate with each other for joint activities using clicking sounds. So far, marine biologists have been able to identify 21 basic building blocks called “codas,” which are most comparable to human letters or syllables. A research team led by Pratyusha Sharma from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has analyzed 60 audio recordings found out, how sperm whales use the coda building blocks in conversation. In the everyday life of the maritime giants, these codas occur not only in their basic form, but also in different variations and lengths depending on the context and are combined with intermediate clicks called “Rubato” and “Ornaments”.

»Larger combinatorial vocalization systems are extremely rare in nature. “However, their use in sperm whales shows that they are not an exclusively human phenomenon and can also arise from completely different physiological, ecological and social constraints,” said the study published in Nature in May 2024. “These results show that context-sensitive and combinatorial vocalizations can occur in organisms with different evolutionary lineages and different vocal tracts,” say the researchers.

Some animals not only chat with each other, but also partially understand human language. Depending on the breed, dogs can understand between 50 and a few hundred words. Monkeys also understand human language. This is shown, among other things, by experiments with orangutans. They can learn to communicate with people using sign language or a computer touch screen. However, due to their anatomy, they cannot actually speak.

Science disagrees about whether animals can speak “language.”

Science is controversially debating the question of whether animal communication methods are really languages. Some say this, others say that, to put it casually. Researchers at the “Universitas Islam Negeri Alauddin” in Makassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi wrote in an article on the university’s website: “A real language differs from a signal code in three essential characteristics: type of communication, pragmatic function and semantics. Some of the signaling codes used by animals could, to a limited extent, have one or more of the features described above (…). Language, on the other hand, must have all linguistic characteristics in order to be considered a language.

Research into animal communication or even languages ​​is still in its infancy. However, experts are highly confident that machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will give a huge boost to the research and decoding of animal languages. But the hurdles are high. In order to decode animal communication with the help of algorithms, huge amounts of data from audio recordings of animal sounds are required. However, these are not yet available due to the animals’ difficult to access habitats.

David Gruber, founder of Project Ceti, and Shane Gero, the project’s lead biologist, want to understand sperm whale codas and have been recording sperm whale conversations with underwater microphones for two decades. But this limited recording process only allows a limited view of the lives of sperm whales, which Gero called the dentist’s office problem in January 2024 to the Financial Times (FT). “If you only study English-speaking society and only record in a dentist’s office, you would think that the words root canal and tooth decay are crucial to English-speaking culture, right?” Ceti is an international initiative to understand the acoustic communication of sperm whales using of artificial intelligence.

Without reference to any specific animal species, the non-profit Earth Species Project, founded in 2017, is dedicated to using AI to decode non-human communication. »More than 8 million species populate our planet. We only understand one language,” says the website of the project based in California’s Silicon Valley. With the help of AI, the Earth Species Project has achieved initial success in overcoming the cocktail party problem. This describes the situation in which everyone is talking at once. Using AI, the project’s experts managed to separate overlapping sounds in the barking of monkeys.

Bias caused by human interpretation

Another problem is people. Much of the training data for generative AI models was based on data sets from human researchers, zoologist and bat expert Yossi Yovel from Tel Aviv University told the FT. “I write that the bats fight for food, but maybe that’s not true,” Yovel mused. “Maybe they’re fighting over something I have no idea about because I’m human.” Eliminating the distortion through human interpretation is impossible.

What makes interpretation even more difficult is that animals communicate with each other in a variety of ways: with sounds, gestures, color changes, smells or even combinations of these techniques. For example, chimpanzees use face-to-face gestures in a similar time structure to how humans speak to one another, reports primatologist Catherine Hobaiter from the University of St Andrews in Scotland in “Current Biology.”

In fairy tales, animals such as Puss in Boots, Monkey King King Louie in the animated film “Jungle Book” or the snake in the Old Testament can talk to people. Despite AI, an app like “Google Translate” for cultivated conversations between people and sperm whales, elephants and other animals is not yet in sight.

»More than 8 million species populate our planet. We only understand one language.”

Earth Species Project