Instant Genius - How animals speak to each other

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

From birdsong to wolf howls, from dolphins’ clicks and whistles to gibbons’ whoops and wows, the natural world is filled with a myriad of animal vocalisations that are as varied as they are numerous. But what is their purpose? How did they evolve? And will we ever be able to understand them?   In this episode we catch up with Dr Arik Kershenbaum, a zoologist based at the University of Cambridge and author of the new book Why Animals Talk.   He tells us why some animals are chattier than others, how wolves have regional accents and how dolphins give themselves names. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to let me. more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. From bird song to wolfhowls, from dolphins' clicks and whistles to gibbons whoops and wows. The natural world is filled with a myriad of animal vocalizations that are as varied as they are numerous. But what is their purpose? How did they evolve? And will we ever be able to understand them? In this episode,

we catch up with Dr. Eric Kirshenbaum, a zoologist based at the University of Cambridge, an author of the new book, Why Animals Talk. He tells us why some animals are chatier than others, how wolves have regional accents, and how dolphins give themselves names. So I think the best place to start here then is just to talk a little bit about your background. You know, What is it that you do and how did you come to do it? So I'm a zoologist, which means that I study what animals do, but more importantly, why they do it. So I'm an evolutionary biologist. So we're looking at why animals make sounds.

Why did they evolve that way? Why did they evolve that particular way of making sounds? You know, everyone's interested in what the animals are saying. But in some ways, I'm more interested in why they're saying it. We've got a pretty good idea of what animals are saying most of the time. But how is it that some animals have really complex communication? How is it some animals have much simpler communication? What's the difference?

What's going on there? What led to this situation? So how do you go about choosing which animals to study then? Well, of course, there are some species that are just really, really charismatic and you just want to, you know, you know that you want to work with wolves, you want to work with dolphins. These are animals that make really interesting sounds, but also they're really intelligent animals.

And we've got this feeling that's like the more intelligent. an animal is, and in particular, the more social intelligence an animal has. So if it lives in complex groups, they're going to have more interesting communication. They just have more to say. So we look a lot for animals that have these really complex societies. Perhaps they cooperate a lot, they have to coordinate their activities. They're the ones who are going to have a lot to say, interesting things to say to each other. So then how do you go about studying this? You know, what's your day-to-day look like when you're doing this? One of the problems with, particularly with wolves and with dolphins,

is that they're really difficult to study. I mean, wolves are really shy. They're active at night a lot. They're in the kind of landscape where it's difficult to get around, you know, deep snow and mountains. And if they don't want to be around you, they're not going to be around you. You're not going to see them if they don't want you to see them. But we use sound.

So we can hear what they're doing, even from far away, even if we can't see them. Same thing with dolphins. Underwater, visibility is really poor underwater. It's really hard to see more than a few meters. And dolphins can certainly swim a lot faster than I can. So, you know, it's really, you can't follow them around. But we can hear really well.

We can hear their sounds. We can hear everything that's going on. So by placing recording devices out in nature, if it's in the mountains or if it's underwater, if it's in the jungle, we get a really good sort of soundcape of what's going on, and we can get a very good idea where the animals are, what they're doing, how they're interacting, even if we can't see them. So you sort of touched on it there. You've studied animals all over the world.

So I've got a couple of questions about this. So first, which ones were the most challenging? And have you had any particularly memorable moments when you're out doing this? Asking for favourites. Challenging comes in many different ways. I suspect that probably our most challenging field site is in Vietnam, in the jungles of Vietnam, where we work with the Calvit Gibbon, which is a critically endangered species of ape. There are only about 70 of these animals left in the world in this tiny patch of very remote forest.

And it's about a six-hour hike to get from the nearest road into the base camp, and it's up and down, steep mountains, thick jungle. And you see the Gibbons moving through the forest with such ease, swinging from tree to tree, covering this ground in, no time at all and you think, why can't I do that? Why am I struggling up these slopes and pulling myself up, crawling up and down? It can be a really, really challenging environment. Working with wolves, I just got back from Yellowstone National Park, where the temperature was minus 30 degrees. You know, a lot of these environments are actually really challenging environments, but these

are the environments in which the animals live. You know, you can't study just from your office. You have to get out there and see what's going on. So maybe more of a philosophical question here. Why do you think we're so fascinated in trying to figure out what animals are saying? You know, it's almost universal across all sorts of cultures, isn't it? It is. We do. We're really fascinated by this. Every culture has got these legends of talking animals, and we seem to have this intuition

that animals are saying something interesting. It manifests itself a lot, of course, in children's stories and Disney movies, but we do have this deep-seated sense that there's something going on out there that we need to understand. But on the other hand, we also have a certain reluctance to admit it. Maybe animals are not saying anything interesting. And in fact, if they were, maybe that would challenge us and our status as human beings as being something special. So we've got this strange, sort of ambivalent attitude towards, should animals talk? Do we really expect them to talk? And of course, the answer to that, the resolution to that dilemma is animals do what's right for them. They're not talking because we

want them to or because we need them to. They've evolved to have their communication system precisely the way that works well for them. And it's up to us to understand that. It's up to us scientists to go out there and understand what it is that animals are saying because that's who the animals are, not because it's who we want them to be. So having said that, do you think there perhaps a tendency to anthropomorphize animals can hamper our understanding of communication in the natural world? I think it doesn't. And I think that it's important to realize that all animals communicate, all animals, from the smallest, up to the largest and including ourselves. Communication is part of what it means to be an animal. And communication has a purpose. It only evolves if it gives

the animals some kind of benefit. So there is something there. There's definitely something going on there. And if we deny that, then we're denying a part of the very nature of these different animals. Now, of course, what's dangerous is to anthropomorphize and to assume or to presume that animals communicate like us. That's certainly not the case. But to deny that they're communicating and that they're conveying interesting information is to fly in the face of what evolution is and why animals behave the way that they do. So coming off the back of that, let's have a look at some specific animals that you mentioned in the book. So first, I think good place to start is with wolves. So everyone will be familiar with their iconic how it's

such a part of pop culture. So first off, how do they actually do that? How do they produce that sound? The howl is a long-range communication signal, right? This is something that wolves are doing to communicate with animals that are far away. Of course, wolves make lots of other sounds that just like dogs, they'll growl and they'll whine and they'll bark and they'll make sounds that are for the reception of other animals that are close by, but the howl is a long-range signal. It's really intended to send a message over a long distance. And it's incredible. loud. I mean, Wolfhowls are really loud. We can hear Wolfhowls from six kilometers away, even more sometimes. So they're producing the sound by focusing the energy that they put into the

sound into a single frequency. So rather than the sort of rather noisy and confused sounds of us talking, the wolves, they put all of that energy into a single frequency, a concentrated signal can really be heard from a very, very long way away. So what do we know about the information? information contained in one of these howls? We think there's at least three things that howling is meant to convey. We know that it's used to advertise territory and to deter other packs from your own territory. So wolves will howl in response to other wolf packs, as if to say, this is my territory, stay away. Wolves will howl to stay in touch with other members of their packs.

So if they are separated and they need to know where each other is, come back together perhaps to go hunting, to look after pups, so they'll howl back and forth to make sure they know where all the members of their pack are. But Wolves also howled just because they enjoy it. When they get together in a pack and they want us to reassure themselves that everything's okay, everyone is here, they'll just how it has become a social activity. So we know that there are at least those three different reasons for howling. And then the question is, are they different types of howls? Are they conveying those three different messages in their house?

And that's something that we need to investigate. This is something we're still studying. We've got good reason to think that there are different kinds of howls or howls that produce a different response in the wolves who hear them. But this is one of the main parts of the research that we do. So how do you study that? Do you make a recording and then sort of do a frequency analysis of the waveform? Yeah, what we do when we study animal sounds is we convert the sound into an image. Because humans are really good at interpreting images. We're not so good at interpreting sounds. And we can make a picture of the sound. And the picture of the sound, you can think of it more or less as like musical notation. So we see how the pitch is going up and down with time. And that really gives us a really good feel for where the information is, what the pitch is doing, how much it's changing? Is it a very flat howl? Oftentimes, you know, wolf's howl with just a constant pitch

the whole time? Oftentimes the pitch goes up and down and they seem a little bit more chaotic and a little bit less organized. Those are two very different kinds of howls. And you see that immediately from this time frequency representation. So one thing that I picked up on when I was reading the book, which I think is quite fun, is this notion of accents or dialects. So say if we've got a wolf from Yellowstone, as you just mentioned, and we take that wolf over to your can they still communicate with one another? Well, the two wolves will still hear each other, and so they will still know that there's another wolf there,

but it's quite likely that that information that we speculate, is there in the howl, is it a friendly howl, is it an aggressive howl, is it a contact howl to stay in touch with members of your pack? It's quite likely that that would not be transferable. And we think that because we see that the actual baseline howls of wolves in different parts of the world are really very, very, very powerful. very different. European wolves tend to howl with really quite flat howls, fairly constant pitch. Arctic wolves and some extent other North American wolves tend to vary the pitch a lot more.

So yeah, European wolf might get a little bit confused if it hears an Arctic wolf and not know quite what to make of that. Okay, that's really interesting. So let's move on to dolphins then, like another really charismatic animal. So anyone around my age, I guess, will probably have seen the television series Flipper, where the family is communicating with Flipper, the dolphin. which is great, it's very cute and all. But dolphins make these clicking and whistling sounds. So what do we know about those? What we know about dolphins is that they live in large groups.

They cooperate in their groups for fishing, for defence and so on. But those groups are very changeable. So the ocean's a big place, and dolphins can swim really fast. So their groups break up, come back together. Sometimes there's 10 dolphins. Sometimes there's two dolphins. And this kind of social fluidity means that communication. is really important. They need to communicate who they are, first of all, so that the other

dolphins around know, are you my friend? Are you someone I worked well with in the past? And we think that dolphin communication is largely to do with managing these really fluid social groups. There's probably a lot more information than that in dolphin communication because they do cooperate and they do collaborate to achieve these sort of cooperative tasks. And communication is probably necessary to do that. So we think there's a lot of. lot of information in there, certainly to do with individual identity and group identity, probably also to do with the things that they want to do together. But on top of that, dolphins are extremely intelligent animals. We know they are genuinely intelligent. And we see that

when you work with dolphins in captivity, you can teach them loads of different communicative tricks. You can teach them to respond in a particular way to different signals, to whistles, or even to symbols. You can show a dolphin a picture, and it could understand what that is meant to represent. So dolphins clearly have the ability, the mental ability to understand very complex communication. How much of that they use in the wild is still an open question. It's something we still need to research. So they have a big key difference between the wolves in that they're underwater. So what effect does that have on their communication? Well, strangely enough, dolphin whistles and wolfhows are very, very similar. And in fact, if you take a dolphin

whistle and you slow it down about 30 times, it will sound to you like a wolf howl. Now, this is no coincidence because wolf howls intended for long range communication in the forest and in the mountains, again, focusing the energy in a single frequency, dolphin whistles do exactly the same thing. Communicating underwater over long distances, you can't see what's going on. The most effective way to do that, focus your energy into one frequency and move that frequency up and down. So in many ways, dolphins when they whistle and wolves when they howl are doing a very similar sort of thing. And the sounds are really similar, even though they don't sound like it, just your ear. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast.

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name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound, and unforgettable listening experiences at home. for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. So I've heard that dolphins actually give one another names. Is that true and how do they do that? It is true. It is something that we've discovered about dolphins over the last two decades, which is that while they're young, as they're growing up, they make themselves a little whistle which sounds different from every other dolphin's whistle. And this becomes a representation of their name.

We call it signature whistle. It's very characteristic of that individual dolphin. And they make sure that it sounds different from the signature whistles of the other dolphins around them. And they do seem to use this whistle to broadcast their identity, to let others know who is here. And again, that's not that surprising,

given this fluid social network that they live in and they need to know, are you, who are you? You're a member of my group? Are you someone that I've worked with in the past that I know well? But it is incredibly rare. In fact, it's the only instance we know of in the animal world outside of humans, where animals give themselves a name.

Plenty of animals can recognize individuals in their group. Wolves can recognize other wolves from their house. That's not quite the same. Here, they're actually crafting themselves their own vocal representation that they can use to say, this is me, this is Ari, I'm here and this is who I am. Yeah, that's fascinating. So I think we can't really talk about animals sort of quote-unquote talking without talking about parrots. So these are probably the most famous of the talking animals. I imagine if you crossed someone on the street and said, name me an animal that they can talk. I bet 90% of them would

say immediately parrots. So what do we know about this? It's a really strange behavior, isn't it? Well, there's a tendency to dismiss parrots and say that they're just mimicking our sounds. And when we say things, they say them back to us. And to a large extent, that's true. That is what they do. But it's really important part of how they learn to communicate. Very few animals will do that will actually copy the sounds of other animals. And that's one of the reasons why parrots are so good at communicating is because they're so good at copying. In fact, there are parrots who have been taught. not just to mimic sounds, but actually to converse in sentences, to understand the essence of the sentence, to understand that words represent objects or characteristics, and to use them intelligently.

There's one parrot in particular back in the 90s, in early 2000s, Alex the parrot, who really could hold a conversation that was far deeper than any other animal-human interaction that there has ever been. So there's something about parrot brains that allows them to understand the nature of language, what language is. We don't think parrots use language in the wild. There's no indication they actually doing this when they're talking to each other. But the fact they can learn to understand human language is very significant. Chimpanzees can do something similar.

Dolphins can probably do something similar. It tells us a lot about the mental and cognitive abilities of these animals that they can learn language. even if they don't use language between themselves when they're in the wild. So you mentioned earlier about the social aspect of an animal's life affecting this. So I think most people's experience with parrots, unfortunately, will be perhaps their great-a-a-a-a-a-tad-one once, you know, in the living room, or just by itself. But do parrots actually in the world? Do they live in groups?

A lot of them do, and it's that group living and the nature of their interactions when they're living in a group that gives them the importance of this communication. You know, every animal has a different niche, has a different way of making their way in the world and surviving and finding food, finding mates. And parrots are no different. There are many different kinds of parrots, many different kinds of lifestyles. But it's those parrots who live in really large groups and meet some form of cooperation between the individuals in the groups that are going to evolve the more complex communication, the ability to copy each other, to use their copying of the different sounds. to help them perhaps manipulate other individuals in their flock? Am I going to mate more successfully than you are? How can I make a more impressive song to impress the females compared to the other

males around me? There's a lot of sort of manipulation going on. And when you live in a group, that becomes even more important. So you mentioned earlier chimpanzees. So let's have a look at chimpanzees then, you know, the humans' closest relative. But obviously they don't speak like we do. So how How do chimpanzees communicate? Well, chimpanzees, like our other closest relatives, gorillas and rangans, are not very vocal. They don't make an awful lot of noise. And so in that sense, there's a little bit of a mystery because here we are, we're very talkative, we're obviously very vocal animals.

Our closest relatives don't seem to be that vocal. You go a little bit further back, our next closest relatives, Gibbons, are actually very vocal. So for some reason, chimps, gorillas, rangatans communicate without using a lot of sound. They do use sounds, but certainly not as much as we do or as much as gibbons do. And chimpanzees communicate largely through gesture, but their gestural communication is so complex and so deeply involved that clearly they have the brains, they have the cognitive abilities to understand a lot of linguistic concept. not everything. They don't have a language. They don't have a language like we do. But like parrots,

like dolphins, they can be taught. They can be taught what nouns are. They can be taught to identify words with objects and so on. So they seem to have some sort of basic linguistic understanding. And that's not surprising because chimpanzees live in incredibly complex social arrangements. Chimpanzees are always worrying about how do I form alliances, who is my friend, who is my enemy, who is my friend's friend's friend's enemy, and how can I turn that to my advantage? So they have these brains that are really geared up for complex social interactions and manipulation, and we think that that kind of social brain is very closely linked to linguistic abilities as well. So chimpanzees live in very sort of group-led societies.

So we mentioned earlier the wolf dialect or accent. Do we see a similar thing in chimpanzees? We think that a lot of chimpanzee communication, so this gestural communication, as well as the vocal communication, is largely learned. So if a young chimpanzee grows up in a particular group where a particular kind of sound is used to represent something, or a particular gesture is used to represent something, then they will learn that gesture, whereas a chimpanzee in another group may learn something different. Now, obviously, there are some gestures that are almost universal. So, If you ever go to the zoo, you see a chimpanzee will hold out its hand if it wants something.

This is not something they've learned from humans. This is genuine chimpanzee behavior, but it has that obvious meaning. If I hold out my hand, palm upwards, I mean put something in it. But there are other gestures, more complex gestures, that are more abstract. And these are clearly learned. And whenever you have communication signals that are learned, as opposed to being innate, then yes, you will find that different groups that are isolated will develop different ways of representing that.

So we've covered quite a few different animals that you've studied there. Would you say there are any common threads running through all of the communication, styles or techniques of the animals that you've studied? So the most obvious thread running through all of this is that complex sociality, complex social groups leads to complex communication. I mean, communication is essentially about mediating behavior between individuals. If you have a lot of individuals with a lot of complicated interactions, communication is going to be necessary to mediate that and to make sure other animals know what you want,

what you're thinking, what you want them to do or what you don't want them to do. So the more complex societies that animals live in, the more complex is their communication by and large. The other thing that we notice, though, is that complex communication doesn't always arise out of complex society. So if you think about something like bird song, you can have some very complex bird song, but there's very, very little information there. Really, all the bird is saying is, look how complex my song is. It's so complex. I must be a really fit, strong male and please come and mate with me or stay out of my territory. So in that case, although the

communication is complex, the message in the communication is the complexity itself. There's no more than that. It's just the more complex, the fitter I am. So those are the two trends that we see across different species. So, of course, studying communication in the animal kingdom is interesting in and of itself. But through studying that, can we learn anything about the evolution of human communication? It's a really difficult question because understanding how human language evolved is perhaps always going to be out of our reach. We'll never be able to go back in time and see what our early ancestors were like. Language doesn't leave fossils, so it is very difficult. But clearly, we have to look around the animal world to see how they communicate, understand

what the kind of constraints on communication are. And one of the things I think that's really important is this observation about sociality and the need for complex communication. Although our closest relatives chimpanzees don't use very complex vocal communication, They do live in very complex social groups, which were probably very similar to the social groups of our ancestors. In fact, although our common ancestor with chimpanzees six million years ago certainly wasn't a chimpanzee, but they were probably not that different, living in the jungle, living in a similar sort of environment, and their descendants went off in two different

directions. One of them stayed in the jungle and eventually evolved into modern chimpanzees. one of them went down to the grasslands and eventually evolved into humans and other human-like species. And whatever changes happened during those six million years, at some point, those creatures evolved a language. Was it because their social groups became much more complex? Some scientists think so. Was it something to do with a different environment now they're in the grassland, not in the jungle? Perhaps these kinds of things are very difficult to research, but we do think that that is the basis of where our language comes from, from social complexity and the need to be able to understand

what other individuals are thinking and to manipulate them. Great. So just sort of a final question then by way of closing. Do you think we'll ever genuinely be able to communicate with animals? We communicate with animals all the time. Anyone with a pet dog or cat communicates with them. And you shouldn't dismiss that. Because even if we're not communicating with them with human language, we're communicating with

them with dog language or cat language, right? We need to communicate with animals their way, not our way. And I think the more we understand how animals communicate, the easier it will be for us to convey to them what we want to say, to understand what they want to say to us. If we try and force animals to understand human language, we're really doing a disservice to the animals themselves. Let's understand how they communicate. Let's understand how they think and what they want to say and how they want to say it. And then we'll be far, far more successful than if we try and create some kind of translator that will translate animal language into human language. Yeah, no, let's talk the way the animals talk and then we'll do much better.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr. Eric Kirshenbaum. To discover more about the topics we just discussed, check out his new book, Why Animals Talk. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine, is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems, combining

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