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A Bird’s Brain Holds Clues to the Sounds of Music

By Jim Robbins Imagine a chicken that could speak or a pigeon with a voice rivaling that of the most musical songbirds. Granted, the world probably doesn’t need any gossiping chickens or pigeons breaking out in song. But why some birds learn to create a deep repertoire and others are unable to has long been a research focus of the neurobiologist Erich D. Jarvis. “Vocal learning, just like spoken language itself, is a rare trait,” said Dr. Jarvis, who directs the Neurogenetics of Language laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York. He studies the small group of species capable of speech, focusing on birds and mice, and he has long hoped to genetically engineer an animal that can vocalize in new ways. Introducing manipulated genes into the brain of a bird or a mouse that doesn’t vocalize could create that ability and provide new clues into the origins of speech. It may also one day help in finding treatments for people with speech problems or brain disorders. Dr. Jarvis, 60, didn’t start his career in neuroengineering. He once hoped to become a professional dancer, performing ballet at Manhattan’s renowned High School for the Performing Arts and then studying at the Alvin Ailey dance school. He was a member of the Westchester Ballet Company when he began wondering how the brain was able to create dance movements. His mentor at Rockefeller was Fernando Nottebohm, the researcher who discovered in the early 1980s that songbird brains generate new neurons each spring to enable them to sing. That revolutionary understanding of neurogenesis led to further findings that all brains, including human ones, grow new neurons throughout life. Until then, it had been scientific gospel that people came into the world with a fixed number. From 2002 to 2005, Dr. Jarvis helped lead the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, a project that renamed the regions of the avian brain to show that it was remarkably sophisticated. The research undermined the use of the term “bird brain” as a pejorative. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 30316 - Posted: 07.08.2026

The lucrative bird-singing contests that are pushing species to the brink

By Sandy Ong On a Sunday afternoon in April, the main minibus terminal in Sukabumi, Indonesia, looked sleepy from the outside. But in an open space round the back, hundreds of men were gathered. Amid chatter and cigarette smoke, the air buzzed with excitement, for one of the region’s biggest bird-singing competitions was set to begin, and a motorbike was among the prizes. As the day progressed, dozens of songbirds were brought out for their 10-minute rounds, from tiny garden sunbirds and grey-cheeked bulbuls to larger oriental magpie-robins and orange-headed thrushes. Then the emcee announced the main event — the singing contest among the highly popular, strikingly handsome white-rumped shamas — and a hush fell over the crowd. The shamas’ owners murmured final words of encouragement and stepped away from their cages. Judges swept in with clipboards, assessing each bird for its song, ability to hold a steady tune, volume and showmanship. Soon it was down to a final two birds . . . and then “Baby White” was crowned the winner amid cheers from the crowd. Many men gathered on a patio beneath hanging cages holding songbirds Since the 1970s, songbird competitions have grown in popularity across Indonesia. With goats, motorcycles, watches and money (sometimes worth up to 10 years’ salary) up for grabs, the events are driving hordes of people to keep songbirds as pets. Indonesians have a long-standing culture of keeping birds as pets, and songbirds are especially popular, prized by collectors for their melodious singing and colorful plumage. “I keep songbirds as a hobby, to relieve stress and also gain a bit of money,” explained Harry Gunawan, a 78-year-old businessman and owner of 39 shamas, including the multiple prizewinning Baby White, while waiting for his new motorbike. Gunawan’s shamas are among an estimated 66 million to 84 million caged birds that are kept across Java, the island where 56 percent of Indonesia’s population lives and one in three households owns birds. These include more than 3 million white-rumped shamas and 2 million oriental magpie-robins. Wild birds are believed to be better songsters; hence, many are trapped in forests then crammed into tiny crates, drainpipes and even plastic bottles, destined for pet markets in Jakarta, Surabaya and other big cities. Birds that survive the journey — estimates of mortality rates range from 30 to 80 percent — will spend the rest of their lives confined to cages.

A little bird told her: scientist wins $100,000 prize for decoding birdsong

Ian Sample Science editor A scientist who decoded the vocalisations that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals – without being met with a blank response. Dr Julie Elie at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize for two-way interspecies communication after working out the 11 core calls in the zebra finch vocabulary and their meanings. Her work revealed how the birds announce who they are and what they are doing, and recognise one another regardless of what they are saying by using individual signatures. She also found that at times, the birds confused calls with similar meanings more than those that sounded the same. “I’m really super-honoured,” Elie said on winning the prize, adding that she hoped the work was a step forwards in the “great endeavour” to communicate with animals. Prof Yossi Yovel, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University and chair of the panel of judges, said the work marked “a key moment in the field”. The prize was launched in 2024 by the Jeremy Coller Foundation, which promotes awareness of animal welfare and animal sentience, in partnership with Tel Aviv University. Beyond the annual prizes for progress, the foundation has established a $10m grand prize for cracking the problem of two-way human-animal communication. Elie decided to study zebra finches because they are so vocal – meaning they produce plenty of data. “The question I asked myself when hearing these chatty songbirds was what are they saying?” she said. For more than a decade, Elie observed and recorded the sounds the birds made and classified the calls according to the situation and the bird that made them. She then used machine learning to analyse what and how information was encoded in the calls. Finally, she ran tests that showed the birds agreed with her classification. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Different sperm whale ‘dialects’ detected on separate sides of the Mediterranean

Nicola Davis Science correspondent From “Howdy” to “G’day”, English – like other languages – is rich in dialects. Now researchers have found sperm whales on different sides of the Mediterranean show similar variations in their vocalisations. Sperm whales communicate vocally using sequences of short clicks called codas. However, the rhythmic pattern of these clicks, known as the dialect, can differ between different matriarchal groups. Crucially, one group of sperm whales will only associate with another if they share the same dialect and hence belong to the same “vocal clan”. “The dialect is used to form social structures, within which these animals will cooperate,” said Dr Luke Rendell, of the University of St Andrews and a co-author of the new study, noting similarities in how humans might be more comfortable striking up a conversation with someone who sounds similar to themselves. a whale Now Rendell and colleagues say they have discovered two different dialects among Mediterraean sperm whales – a small, endangered population of a few thousand individuals that are thought to have first entered these waters about 20,000 years ago. What’s more, they say the finding offers new insights into how sperm whale dialects arise. Writing in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team note genetic studies have previously suggested Mediterranean sperm whales have become isolated from other sperm whales. There are also signs that mating between those in the western and eastern Mediterranean basins is restricted, although individuals have been spotted moving between the two. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

These birds clack their wing bones together to woo mates at night

By Jake Buehler A series of sharp cracks splits the nighttime air in a forest in the Andean foothills. But this isn’t the sound of boots snapping twigs underfoot. It’s a bird. Male scissor-tailed nightjars (Hydropsalis torquata) create these abrupt sounds by hitting the bones in their wings together in a forceful snap, researchers report in the May Journal of Avian Biology. Nightjars are largely nocturnal, insect-eating birds related to hummingbirds and swifts. H. torquata males are unusual for their exceptionally long, paired tail feathers. These males were already known to make explosive cracking noises at night as a mating signal to any nearby females. But little was understood about how they were doing it, says Juan Ignacio Areta, an evolutionary naturalist at Instituto de Bio y Geociencias del Noroeste Argentino in Salta, Argentina. “Many nocturnal animals are well known for being extremely silent, such as the ‘silent’ flight of owls,” Areta says. “We wanted to learn how it was possible for a nocturnal animal to make these loud sounds.” In late 2022, Areta and Christopher Clark — a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, Riverside — covertly filmed the male birds at night along a forest road near Salta. They used high-speed infrared cameras and then compared the footage to the sounds they were recording. Often, the nightjars would hop off the ground and swing their wings together behind their backs, creating a loud clack upon impact. Sometimes the males did this while flying or while mating with a female. The birds weren’t just hitting their feathers together. It was clear to the researchers that the snaps came from the wrist bones colliding just below the last bend in the wing. Areta and Clark think the bones vibrating from the forceful collision create the abrupt snapping sound. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 30273 - Posted: 06.10.2026

Sperm whales’ communication closely parallels human language, study finds

Oliver Milman We may appear to have little in common with sperm whales – enormous, ocean-dwelling animals that last shared a common ancestor with humans more than 90 million years ago. But the whales’ vocalized communications are remarkably similar to our own, researchers have discovered. Not only do sperm whale have a form of “alphabet” and form vowels within their vocalizations but the structure of these vowels behaves in the same way as human speech, the new study has found. Sperm whales communicate in a series of short clicks called codas. Analysis of these clicks shows that the whales can differentiate vowels through the short or elongated clicks or through rising or falling tones, using patterns similar to languages such as Mandarin, Latin and Slovenian. The structure of the whales’ communication has “close parallels in the phonetics and phonology of human languages, suggesting independent evolution”, the paper, published in the Proceedings B journal, states. Sperm whale coda vocalizations are “highly complex and represent one of the closest parallels to human phonology of any analyzed animal communication system”, it added. The findings are the latest discovery about the lives of sperm whales by Project Ceti (standing for Cetacean Translation Initiative), an organization that has studied whales off the coast of Dominica in an attempt to find out what they are saying. Last month, the project released video of a sperm whale giving birth while other whales supported it. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Listen to the oldest known recording of a whale

By Meghan Bartels On March 7, 1949, researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) were stationed on a boat called the R/V Atlantis that was sailing off the coast of Bermuda. They lowered a primitive underwater recording setup into the ocean, and a boxy machine more regularly found in offices began etching the sounds of the sea—a chorus of eerie howls and rustling waves—into a thin plastic disk. That disk made its way to WHOI’s archives in Massachusetts, where it sat, an overlooked relic of the earliest days of underwater acoustic recording. Fast-forward nearly eight decades, and experts at WHOI have rediscovered the recording and determined it’s probably the oldest whale recording still in existence. The likely vocalist? A humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae). The scientists who stumbled on the rare recording are eager to use it for science. “Data from this time period simply don’t exist in most cases,” said Laela Sayigh, a marine bioacoustician at WHOI, in a statement. “This recording can provide insight into how humpback whale sounds have changed over time, as well as serving as a baseline for measuring how human activity shapes the ocean soundscape.” The recording dates to a time when the North Atlantic Ocean’s humpback whales were struggling because of decades of commercial whaling. By 1955, the population had likely fallen below 1,000 animals, experts have since estimated. And although humpback whales are due for a thorough census, even outdated estimates suggest there are at least 20 to 25 times the number of these animals in the region today. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

These Birds Learned to Tweet Like R2-D2. Listen to the Uncanny Results

By Kate Graham-Shaw A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, R2-D2 beeped and booped—and now birds that copy the Star Wars character are giving scientists fresh insight into how different species imitate complex sounds. A study, published recently in Scientific Reports, analyzed the sounds of nine species of parrots, including Budgies, as well as European Starlings to see how accurately each bird mimicked R2-D2’s robotic whirring. Researchers did acoustic analyses on samples of birds imitating the plucky droid that were already available online to compare how statistically similar each bird’s noises were to a model of R2-D2’s sounds. The starlings, a type of songbird, emerged as star vocalists: their ability to produce “multiphonic” noises—in their case, two different notes or tones expressed simultaneously—allowed them to replicate R2-D2’s complex chirps more accurately. Parrots and budgies, which only produce “monophonic” (or single-tone) noises, imitated the droid’s sounds with less accuracy and musicality. The differing abilities stem from physical variations in the birds’ “syrinx”—a unique vocal organ that sits at the base of the avian windpipe. “Starlings can produce two sounds at once because they control both sides of the syrinx independently,” says study co-author Nick Dam, an evolutionary biologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Parrots are physically incapable of producing two tones simultaneously.” It isn’t exactly known why different species developed differing control over their syrinx. “Likely, some ancestor of songbirds happened to evolve the ability to control the muscles on both sides of the syrinx, and this helped them in some way,” says University of Northern Colorado biologist Lauryn Benedict, who wasn’t involved in the study but sometimes works with its authors. One of the leading explanations involves mating; the better at singing a male songbird is, the more females he attracts. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

AI is helping to decode animals’ speech. Will it also let us talk with them?

Rachel Fieldhouse Deep in the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mélissa Berthet found bonobos doing something thought to be uniquely human. During the six months that Berthet observed the primates, they combined calls in several ways to make complex phrases1. In one example, bonobos (Pan paniscus) that were building nests together added a yelp, meaning ‘let’s do this’, to a grunt that says ‘look at me’. “It’s really a way to say: ‘Look at what I’m doing, and let’s do this all together’,” says Berthet, who studies primates and linguistics at the University of Rennes, France. In another case, a peep that means ‘I would like to do this’ was followed by a whistle signalling ‘let’s stay together’. The bonobos combine the two calls in sensitive social contexts, says Berthet. “I think it’s to bring peace.” The study, reported in April, is one of several examples from the past few years that highlight just how sophisticated vocal communication in non-human animals can be. In some species of primate, whale2 and bird, researchers have identified features and patterns of vocalization that have long been considered defining characteristics of human language. These results challenge ideas about what makes human language special — and even how ‘language’ should be defined. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many scientists turn to artificial intelligence (AI) tools to speed up the detection and interpretation of animal sounds, and to probe aspects of communication that human listeners might miss. “It’s doing something that just wasn’t possible through traditional means,” says David Robinson, an AI researcher at the Earth Species Project, a non-profit organization based in Berkeley, California, that is developing AI systems to decode communication across the animal kingdom. As the research advances, there is increasing interest in using AI tools not only to listen in on animal speech, but also to potentially talk back. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29931 - Posted: 09.17.2025

Hitting city streets to record rat behaviors

By Marta Hill Most people flinch when a rat scurries into their path, but not one New York City-based research team: These researchers actively seek out urban rats to study their day-to-day behaviors and interactions. The work is part of a growing trend of neuroscientists studying animals in their natural environments rather than in the lab. “It’s a classic neuroscience model organism, but we don’t really know that much about their natural ecology,” says team member Emily Mackevicius, senior research scientist at Basis Research Institute. The fact that urban rats are ubiquitous presents a convenient opportunity for naturalistic study, adds Ralph Peterson, a postdoctoral fellow at the institute, who is also part of the team. Last year, Peterson, Mackevicius and their colleagues held a series of rat behavior stakeouts around New York City—in the Union Square subway station, in a wooded area of Central Park and on a street corner in Harlem. The team used thermal cameras to track the animals as they foraged in the dark and ultrasonic audio recorders to eavesdrop on rat vocalizations. Rats in the wild vocalize differently than laboratory rats, the team found. For example, lab rats typically emit calls at 22 kilohertz in negative contexts, such as when they sense danger, according to a 2021 review article. By contrast, the city rats used that frequency across more varied scenarios, including while they were foraging. The team posted their results on bioRxiv last month. “This creature that we see out at night all the time, running around, is actually vocalizing all the while, and we can’t hear it,” Peterson says. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 29893 - Posted: 08.20.2025

A new study knocks down a popular hypothesis about why birds sing at dawn

James Doubek Researchers have some new evidence about what makes birds make so much noise early in the morning, and it's not for some of the reasons they previously thought. For decades, a dominant theory about why birds sing at dawn — called the "dawn chorus" — has been that they can be heard farther and more clearly at that time. Sound travels faster in humid air and it's more humid early in the morning. It's less windy, too, which is thought to lessen any distortion of their vocalizations. But scientists from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and Project Dhvani in India combed through audio recordings of birds in the rainforest. They say they didn't find evidence to back up this "acoustic transmission hypothesis." It was among the hypotheses involving environmental factors. Another is that birds spend their time singing at dawn because there's low light and it's a bad time to look for food. "We basically didn't find much support for some of these environmental cues which have been purported in literature as hypotheses" for why birds sing more at dawn, says Vijay Ramesh, a postdoctoral research associate at Cornell and the study's lead author. The study, called "Why is the early bird early? An evaluation of hypotheses for avian dawn-biased vocal activity," was published this month in the peer-reviewed journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. The researchers didn't definitively point to one reason for why the dawn chorus is happening, but they found support for ideas that the early morning racket relates to birds marking their territory after being inactive at night, and communicating about finding food. © 2025 npr

Crafty curlews: birds eavesdrop on prairie dog calls to evade predators

Associated Press Prairie dogs bark to alert each other to the presence of predators, with different cries depending on whether the threat is airborne or approaching by land. But their warnings also seem to help a vulnerable grassland bird. Curlews have figured out that if they eavesdrop on alarms from US prairie dog colonies they may get a jump on predators coming for them, too, according to research published on Thursday in the journal Animal Behavior. “Prairie dogs are on the menu for just about every predator you can think of – golden eagles, red-tailed hawks, foxes, badgers, even large snakes,” said Andy Boyce, a research ecologist in Montana at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. Such animals also gladly snack on grassland nesting birds such as the long-billed curlew, so the birds have adapted. Previous research has shown birds frequently eavesdrop on other bird species to glean information about food sources or danger, said Georgetown University ornithologist Emily Williams, who was not involved in the study. But, so far, scientists have documented only a few instances of birds eavesdropping on mammals. “That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s rare in the wild,” she said, “it just means we haven’t studied it yet.” Prairie dogs, a type of ground squirrel, live in large colonies with a series of burrows that may stretch for miles underground, especially on the vast US plains. When they hear each other’s barks, they either stand alert watching or dive into their burrows. “Those little barks are very loud; they can carry quite a long way,” said research co-author Andrew Dreelin, who also works for the Smithsonian. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Age and migration influence bird groups’ song repertoires

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Which songs birds sing can – as with human music – be influenced by age, social interactions and migration, researchers have found. Not all birds learn songs, but among those that do, individuals, neighbourhoods and populations can produce different collections of tunes, akin to different music albums. Now researchers have found that changes in the makeup of a group of birds can influence factors including which songs they learn, how similar those songs are to each other and how quickly songs are replaced. Dr Nilo Merino Recalde, the first author of the study, from the University of Oxford, said: “This is very interesting, I think, partly because it shows that there are all these kind of common elements at play when it comes to shaping learned traits, [similar to] what happens with human languages and human music.” But he said the parallels had their limits. “The function and the role of human music and language is very, very different to the function of birdsong,” he said. “Birdsong is used to repel rivals, to protect territories, to entice mates, this kind of thing. And that also shapes songs.” Writing in the journal Current Biology, Recalde and colleagues describe how they used physical tracking as well as artificial intelligence to match recorded songs to individual male great tits living in Wytham Woods in Oxford. In total, the study encompassed 20,000 hours of sound recordings and more than 100,000 songs, captured over three years. The researchers used their AI models to analyse the repertoires of individual birds, those within neighbourhoods and across the entire population to explore how similar the various songs were. As a result, the team were able to unpick how population turnover, immigration and age structure influenced the songs. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

How Much Can Animals Really Communicate?

By Erica Goode Over the last decades, researchers who study animal behavior have succeeded in largely blurring the line between Homo sapiens and other animals. Like their human counterparts, animals feel emotions, they solve problems, they communicate and form complicated relationships, investigators have found. Any number of books — think of Ed Yong’s “An Immense World” or Marc Bekoff’s “The Emotional Lives of Animals” — have been dedicated to exploring these relatively recently recognized abilities. Yet few books on the ways animals communicate have been written through the eyes of a scientist as cautious and as thoughtful as zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, the author of “Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication.” Kershenbaum, a lecturer and fellow at the University of Cambridge, is distrustful of simplistic explanations, wary of assumptions, devoted to caveats — few statements come without qualification. In Socratic fashion, he asks a lot of questions, the answers to which, in many cases, neither he nor anyone else can yet provide. That did not deter him from writing the book and it should not deter other people from reading it. But those who pick up “Why Animals Talk” expecting to find proof of animal telepathy or hoping for a dictionary of elephant-speak or a word-for-word translation of humpback whale songs, will be disappointed. (On Amazon, one disgruntled reviewer summarized the book: “Animals don’t really talk – The End.”) If there is a message that Kershenbaum wants to get across, it’s that, as much as we’d like to be able to hold conversations with our pets or chat with chimpanzees at the zoo, it makes no sense to expect animals to communicate in the same way that humans do, “with the same equipment as we have, the same ears and eyes and brains.”

Long Distance Whale Synchrony: Coincidence or Communication?

By Joanna Thompson, Hakai Magazine From January to May each year, Qeqertarsuaq Tunua, a large bay on Greenland’s west coast, teems with plankton. Baleen whales come to feast on the bounty, and in 2010, two bowhead whales entered the bay to gorge. As the pair came within 100 kilometers (about 60 miles) of one another, they were visually out of range, but could likely still hear one another. That’s when something extraordinary happened: They began to synchronize their dives. Researchers had never scientifically documented this behavior before, and the observation offers potential proof for a 53-year-old theory. Baleen whales are often thought of as solitary — islands unto themselves. However, some scientists believe they travel in diffuse herds, communicating over hundreds of kilometers. Legendary biologist Roger Payne and oceanographer Douglas Webb first floated the concept of acoustic herd theory (or should it be heard theory?) in 1971. This story is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems, and is republished here with permission. Payne, who helped discover and record humpback whale song a few years prior, was struck by the fact that many toothed cetaceans such as killer whales and dolphins are highly social and move together in tight-knit family groups. These bands provide safety from predators and allow the animals to raise their young communally. Payne speculated that the larger baleen whales might travel in groups, too, but on a broader geographic scale. And perhaps the behemoths signaled acoustically to keep in touch across vast distances. Webb and Payne’s original paper on acoustic herd theory demonstrated that fin whale vocalizations — low-frequency sounds that carry long distances — could theoretically travel an astonishing 700 kilometers (over 400 miles) in certain areas of the ocean. However, it’s been easier to show that a whale is making a call than to prove the recipient is a fellow cetacean hundreds of kilometers away, says Susan Parks, a behavioral ecologist at Syracuse University in New York who studies animal acoustics.

Speaking With Whales

By Katarina Zimmer If we could talk with whales, should we? When scientists in Alaska recently used pre-recorded whale sounds to engage in a 20-minute back-and-forth with a local humpback whale, some hailed it as the first “conversation” with the cetaceans. But the interaction between an underwater speaker mounted on the research boat and the whale, which was described last year in the journal PeerJ, also stimulated a broader discussion around the ethics of communicating with other species. After the whale circled the boat for a while, the puffs from her blowhole sounded wheezier than usual, suggesting to the scientists aboard that she was aroused in some way—perhaps curious, frustrated, or bored. Nevertheless, Twain—as scientists had nicknamed her—continued to respond to the speaker’s calls until they stopped. Twain called back three more times, but the speaker on the boat had fallen silent. She swam away. Scientists have used recorded calls to study animal behavior and communication for decades. But new efforts—and technology such as artificial intelligence—are striving not just to deafly mimic animal communication, but also to more deeply understand it. And while the potential extension of this research that has most captured public excitement—producing our own coherent whale sounds and meaningfully communicating with them—is still firmly in the realm of science fiction, this kind of research might just bring us a small step closer. The work to decipher whale vocalizations was inspired by the research on humpback whale calls by the biologist Roger Payne and played an important role in protecting the species. In the 1960s, Payne discovered that male humpbacks sing—songs so intricate and powerful it was hard to imagine they have no deeper meaning. His album of humpback whale songs became an anthem to the “Save the Whales” movement and helped motivate the creation of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 in the United States. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

These Monkeys Call One Another by Name

By Emily Anthes The common marmoset is a certified chatterbox. The small, South American monkey uses an array of chirps, whistles and trills to defend its territory, flag the discovery of food, warn of impending danger and find family members hidden by dense forest foliage. Marmosets also use distinct calls to address different individuals, in much the same way that people use names, new research suggests. The findings make them the first nonhuman primates known to use name-like vocal labels for individuals. Until this year, only humans, dolphins and parrots were known to use names when communicating. In June, however, scientists reported that African elephants appeared to use names, too; researchers made the discovery by using artificial intelligence-powered software to detect subtle patterns in the elephants’ low-pitched rumbles. In the new study, which was published in Science last month, a different team of researchers also used A.I. to uncover name-like labels hiding in the calls of common marmosets. The discovery, which is part of a burgeoning scientific effort to use sophisticated computational tools to decode animal communication, could help shed light on the origins of language. And it raises the possibility that name-bestowing behavior may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than scientists once assumed. “I think what it’s telling us is that it’s likely that animals actually have names for each other a lot more than maybe we ever conceived,” said George Wittemyer, a conservation biologist at Colorado State University who led the recent elephant study but was not involved in the marmoset research. “We just never were really looking properly.” Marmosets are highly social, forming long-term bonds with their mates and raising their offspring cooperatively in small family groups. They produce high-pitched, whistle-like “phee calls” to communicate with other marmosets who might be hidden among the treetops. “They start to exchange phee calls when they lose eyesight of each other,” said David Omer, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who led the new study. © 2024 The New York Times Company

This Spider Uses a Light Show to Trick Eager Male Fireflies Into Its Web

By Darren Incorvaia Imagine being a male firefly when suddenly the telltale flashing of a female catches your eye. Enthralled, you speed toward love’s embrace — only to fly headfirst into a spider’s web. That flashy female was in fact another male firefly, himself trapped in the web, and the spider may have manipulated his light beacon to lure you in. This high-stakes drama plays out nightly in the Jiangxia District of Wuhan, China. There, researchers have found that male fireflies caught in the webs of the orb-weaver spider Araneus ventricosus flash their light signals more like females do, which leads other males to get snagged in the same web. And weirdly, the spiders might be making them do this, almost like hunters blowing a duck call to attract prey. “The idea that a spider can manipulate the signaling of a prey species is very intriguing,” said Dinesh Rao, a spider biologist at the University of Veracruz in Mexico. “They show clearly that a trapped firefly in the web attracts more fireflies.” Dr. Rao was not involved in the research, but served as a peer reviewer of the paper published Monday in the journal Current Biology. Xinhua Fu, a zoologist at Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan, was in the field surveying firefly diversity when he first noticed that male fireflies seemed to end up ensnared in orb-weaver spider webs more often than females. Wondering if the spiders were somehow specifically attracting males, he teamed up with Daiqin Li and Shichang Zhang, animal behavior experts from nearby Hubei University, to get to the bottom of this sticky mystery. Working near paddy fields and ponds, the researchers observed the flashing of trapped male fireflies and saw that it more closely resembled that of females than of free-flying males. Trapped males flashed using only one of their two bioluminescent lantern organs, and they made one flash at a time rather than multiple flashes in quick succession, the same lighting signals females send when trying to attract males. © 2024 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 29443 - Posted: 08.21.2024

Elephants call each other by name

Elephants call out to each other using individual names that they invent for their fellow pachyderms, according to a new study. While dolphins and parrots have been observed addressing each other by mimicking the sound of others from their species, elephants are the first non-human animals known to use names that do not involve imitation, the researchers suggested. For the new study published on Monday, a team of international researchers used an artificial intelligence algorithm to analyse the calls of two wild herds of African savanna elephants in Kenya. The research “not only shows that elephants use specific vocalisations for each individual, but that they recognise and react to a call addressed to them while ignoring those addressed to others”, the lead study author, Michael Pardo, said. The video player is currently playing an ad. “This indicates that elephants can determine whether a call was intended for them just by hearing the call, even when out of its original context,” the behavioural ecologist at Colorado State University said in a statement. The researchers sifted through elephant “rumbles” recorded at Kenya’s Samburu national reserve and Amboseli national park between 1986 and 2022. Using a machine-learning algorithm, they identified 469 distinct calls, which included 101 elephants issuing a call and 117 receiving one. Elephants make a wide range of sounds, from loud trumpeting to rumbles so low they cannot be heard by the human ear. Names were not always used in the elephant calls. But when names were called out, it was often over a long distance, and when adults were addressing young elephants. Adults were also more likely to use names than calves, suggesting it could take years to learn this particular talent. The most common call was “a harmonically rich, low-frequency sound”, according to the study in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

How Sound Rules Life Underwater

By Amorina Kingdon Like most humans, I assumed that sound didn’t work well in water. After all, Jacques Cousteau himself called the ocean the “silent world.” I thought, beyond whales, aquatic animals must not use sound much. How wonderfully wrong I was. In water a sound wave travels four and a half times faster, and loses less energy, than in air. It moves farther and faster and carries information better. In the ocean, water exists in layers and swirling masses of slightly different densities, depending on depth, temperature, and saltiness. The physics-astute reader will know that the density of the medium in which sound travels influences its speed. So, as sound waves spread through the sea, their speed changes, causing complex reflection or refraction and bending of the sound waves into “ducts” and “channels.” Under the right circumstances, these ducts and channels can carry sound waves hundreds and even thousands of kilometers. What about other sensory phenomena? Touch and taste work about the same in water as in air. But the chemicals that tend to carry scent move slower in water than in air. And water absorbs light very easily, greatly diminishing visibility. Even away from murky coastal waters, in the clearest seas, light vanishes below several hundred meters and visibility below several dozen. So sound is often the best, if not only, way for ocean and freshwater creatures to signal friends, detect enemies, and monitor the world underwater. And there is much to monitor: Earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanic activity rumble through the oceans, beyond a human’s hearing range. Ice cracks, booms, and scrapes the seafloor. Waves hiss and roar. Raindrops plink. If you listen carefully, you can tell wind speed, rainfall, even drop size, by listening to the ocean as a storm passes. Even snowfall makes a sound. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 29341 - Posted: 06.04.2024

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