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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,

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: 30017 - Posted: 11.19.2025

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

Why cicadas shriek so loudly and more: your questions answered

By Sumeet Kulkarni As spring turns to summer in the United States, warming conditions have started to summon enormous numbers of red-eyed periodical cicadas out of their holes in the soil across the east of the country. This year sees an exceptionally rare joint emergence of two cicada broods: one that surfaces every 13 years and another with a 17-year cycle. They last emerged together in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was US president. This year, billions or even trillions of cicadas from these two broods — each including multiple species of the genus Magicicada — are expected to swarm forests, fields and urban neighbourhoods. To answer readers’ cicada questions, Nature sought help from three researchers. Katie Dana is an entomologist affiliated with the Illinois Natural History Survey at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. John Lill is an insect ecologist at George Washington University in Washington DC. Fatima Husain is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their answers have been edited for length and clarity. Why do periodical cicadas have red eyes? JL: We’re not really sure. We do know that cicadas’ eyes turn red in the winter before the insects come out. The whole coloration pattern in periodical cicadas is very bright: red eyes, black and orange wings. They’re quite different from the annual cicadas, which are green and black, and more camouflaged. It’s a bit of an enigma why the periodical ones are so brightly coloured, given that it just makes them more obvious to predators. There are no associated defences with being brightly coloured — it kind of flies in the face of what we know about bright coloration in a lot of other animals, where usually it’s some kind of signal for toxicity. There also exist mutants with brown, orange, golden or even blue eyes. People hunt for blue-eyed ones; it’s like trying to find a four-leaf clover. © 2024 Springer Nature Limited

Belugas may communicate by warping a blob of forehead fat

By Elizabeth Anne Brown The beluga whale wears its heart on its sleeve — or rather, its forehead. Researchers have created a visual encyclopedia of the different expressions that belugas (Delphinapterus leucas) in captivity seem to make with their highly mobile “melon,” a squishy deposit of fat on the forehead that helps direct sound waves for echolocation. Using muscles and connective tissue, belugas can extend the melon forward until it juts over their lips like the bill of a cap; mush it down until it’s flattened against their skull; lift it vertically to create an impressive fleshy top hat; and shake it with such force that it jiggles like Jell-O. “If that doesn’t scream ‘pay attention to me,’ I don’t know what does,” says animal behaviorist Justin Richard of the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. “It’s like watching a peacock spread their feathers.” Before Richard became a scientist, he spent a decade as a beluga trainer at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut, working closely with the enigmatic animals. “Even as a trainer, I knew the shapes meant something,” Richard says. “But nobody had been able to put together enough observations to make sense of it.” Over the course of a year, from 2014 to 2015, Richard and colleagues recorded interactions between four belugas at the Mystic Aquarium. Analyzing the footage revealed that the belugas make five distinct melon shapes the scientists dubbed flat, lift, press, push and shake. The belugas sported an average of nearly two shapes per minute during social interaction, the team reports March 2 in Animal Cognition. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024

How Whales Could Help Us Speak to Aliens

By Claire Cameron On Aug. 19, 2021, a humpback whale named Twain whupped back. Specifically, Twain made a series of humpback whale calls known as “whups” in response to playback recordings of whups from a boat of researchers off the coast of Alaska. The whale and the playback exchanged calls 36 times. On the boat was naturalist Fred Sharpe of the Alaska Whale Foundation, who has been studying humpbacks for over two decades, and animal behavior researcher Brenda McCowan, a professor at the University of California, Davis. The exchange was groundbreaking, Sharpe says, because it brought two linguistic beings—humans and humpback whales—together. “You start getting the sense that there’s this mutual sense of being heard.” In their 2023 published results, McGowan, Sharpe, and their coauthors are careful not to characterize their exchange with Twain as a conversation. They write, “Twain was actively engaged in a type of vocal coordination” with the playback recordings. To the paper’s authors, the interspecies exchange could be a model for perhaps something even more remarkable: an exchange with an extraterrestrial intelligence. Sharpe and McGowan are members of Whale SETI, a team of scientists at the SETI Institute, which has been scanning the skies for decades, listening for signals that may be indicative of extraterrestrial life. The Whale SETI team seeks to show that animal communication, and particularly, complex animal vocalizations like those of humpback whales, can provide scientists with a model to help detect and decipher a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. And, while they’ve been trying to communicate with whales for years, this latest reported encounter was the first time the whales talked back. It all might sound far-fetched. But then again, Laurance Doyle, an astrophysicist who founded the Whale SETI team and has been part of the SETI Institute since 1987, is accustomed to being doubted by the mainstream science community. © 2024 NautilusNext Inc.,

By fluttering its wings, this bird uses body language to tell its mate ‘after you’

By Darren Incorvaia Be it an arched eyebrow, a shaken head or a raised finger, humans wordlessly communicate complex ideas through gestures every day. This ability is rare in the animal kingdom, having been observed only in primates (SN: 8/10/10). Scientists now might be able to add a feathered friend to the club. Researchers have observed Japanese tits making what they call an “after you” gesture: A bird flutters its wings, cuing its mate to enter the nest first. The finding, reported in the March 25 Current Biology, “shows that Japanese tits not only use wing fluttering as a symbolic gesture, but also in a complex social context involving a sender, receiver and a specific goal, much like how humans communicate,” says biologist Toshitaka Suzuki of the University of Tokyo. Suzuki has been listening in on the calls of Japanese tits (Parus minor) for more than 17 years. During his extensive time in the field, he noticed that Japanese tits bringing food to the nest would sometimes perch on a branch and flutter their wings. At that point, their partners would enter the nest with the flutterer close behind. “This led me to investigate whether this behavior fulfills the criteria of gestures,” Suzuki says. Suzuki and Norimasa Sugita, a researcher at Tokyo’s National Museum of Nature and Science, observed eight mated pairs make 321 trips to their nests. A pattern quickly emerged: Females fluttered their wings far more often than males, with six females shaking it up while only one male did. Females almost always entered the nest first — unless they fluttered their wings. Then the males went first. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

It’s the Cat’s Meow but You Just Don’t Understand

By Anthony Ham What is the meaning of a cat’s meow that grows louder and louder? Or your pet’s sudden flip from softly purring as you stroke its back to biting your hand? It turns out these misunderstood moments with your cat may be more common than not. A new study by French researchers, published last month in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science, found that people were significantly worse at reading the cues of an unhappy cat (nearly one third got it wrong) than those of a contented cat (closer to 10 percent). The study also suggested that a cat’s meows and other vocalizations are greatly misinterpreted and that people should consider both vocal and visual cues to try to determine what’s going on with their pets. The researchers drew these findings from the answers of 630 online participants; respondents were volunteers recruited through advertisements on social media. Each watched 24 videos of differing cat behaviors. One third depicted only vocal communication, another third just visual cues, and the remainder involved both. “Some studies have focused on how humans understand cat vocalizations,” said Charlotte de Mouzon, lead author of the study and a cat behavior expert at the Université Paris Nanterre. “Other studies studied how people understand cats’ visual cues. But studying both has never before been studied in human-cat communication.” Cats display a wide range of visual signals: tails swishing side to side, or raised high in the air; rubbing and curling around our legs; crouching; flattening ears or widening eyes. Their vocals can range from seductive to threatening: meowing, purring, growling, hissing and caterwauling. At last count, kittens were known to use nine different forms of vocalization, while adult cats uttered 16. That we could better understand what a cat wants by using visual and vocal cues may seem obvious. But we know far less than we think we do. © 2024 The New York Times Compan

Some mysteries remain about why dogs wag their tails

By Jude Coleman When it comes to tail wagging among dogs, some questions still hound researchers. We know that domesticated dogs (Canis familiaris) use their tails to communicate — with other dogs as well as humans — and even what various types of wags mean, researchers note in a new review of the scientific literature. But we don’t know why dogs seem to wag more than other canines or even how much of it is under their control, ethologist Silvia Leonetti and colleagues report January 17 in Biology Letters. “Among all possible animal behavior that humans experience in everyday life, domestic dog tail wagging is one of the most common,” says Leonetti, who is now at the University of Turin in Italy. “But a lot of dog behavior remains a scientific enigma.” So Leonetti and her colleagues pored through previous studies to figure out what elements of tail wagging are understood and which remain mysterious. They also hypothesized about the behavior’s origins: Perhaps tail wagging placates some human need for rhythm, the researchers suggest, or maybe the behavior is a genetic tagalong, a trait tied to others that humans bred into domesticated dogs. “People think wagging tail equals happy dog. But it’s actually a lot more complicated than that,” says Emily Bray, an expert in canine cognition at the University of Arizona in Tucson who was not involved with the work. Understanding why dogs wag their tails is important partly from an animal welfare perspective, she says, as it could help dog owners read their pups’ cues better. One main thing that researchers know about tail wagging is that it’s used predominantly for communication instead of locomotion, like a whale, or swatting away bugs, like a horse. Wagging also means different things depending on how the tail is wagged, such as its height or side-to-side movement. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2024.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29103 - Posted: 01.18.2024

Songbirds flex singing muscles every day to stay in shape

A new study shows male zebra finches must sing every day to keep their vocal muscles in shape. Females prefer the songs of males that did their daily vocal workout. Sponsor Message ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: Why do songbirds sing so much? Well, a new study suggests they have to to stay in shape. Here's NPR's Ari Daniel. ARI DANIEL, BYLINE: A few years ago, I was out at dawn in South Carolina low country, a mix of swamp and trees draped in Spanish moss. (SOUNDBITE OF BIRDS CHIRPING) DANIEL: The sound of birdsong filled the air. It's the same in lots of places. Once the light of day switches on, songbirds launch their serenade. IRIS ADAM: I mean, why birds sing is relatively well-answered. DANIEL: Iris Adam is a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Southern Denmark. ADAM: For many songbirds, males sing to impress a female and attract them as mate. And also, birds sing to defend their territory. DANIEL: But Adam says these reasons don't explain why songbirds sing so darn much. ADAM: There's an insane drive to sing. DANIEL: For some, it's hours every day. That's a lot of energy. Plus, singing can be dangerous. ADAM: As soon as you sing, you reveal yourself - like, where you are, that you even exist, where your territory is. All of that immediately is out in the open for predators, for everybody. DANIEL: Why take that risk? Adam wondered whether the answer might lie in the muscles that produce birdsong and if those muscles require regular exercise. So she designed a series of experiments on zebra finches, little Australian songbirds with striped heads and a bloom of orange on their cheeks. One of Adam's first experiments involved taking males and severing the connection between their brains and their singing muscles. ADAM: Already after two days, they had lost some of their performance. And after three weeks, they were back to the same level when they were juveniles and never had sung before. DANIEL: Next, she left the finches intact but prevented them from singing for a week by keeping them in the dark almost around the clock. ADAM: The first two or three days, it's quite easy. But the longer the experiment goes, the more they are like, I need to sing. And so then you need to tell them, like, stop. You can't sing. DANIEL: After a week, the birds' singing muscles lost half their strength. But does that impact what the resulting song sounds like? Here's a male before the seven days of darkness. © 2023 npr

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