The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Can We Understand Nature's Language?

Episode Date: May 26, 2026

Researchers are beginning to investigate two frontiers that challenge long-held assumptions about the natural world: how animals communicate and whether forests function as complex, social systems. Advances in artificial intelligence are helping decode patterns in animal signals once thought to be beyond human understanding, raising difficult ethical and legal questions about what non-human species may be expressing. At the same time, new research on trees suggests forests may operate through interconnected networks that share resources and respond collectively to environmental stress. We examine what emerging science is revealing about animal minds and forest ecosystems, how these findings are being interpreted, and what they could mean for how humans define intelligence, responsibility, and the natural world itself. Kristin Andrews, philosophy professor at York University and York Research Chair in Animal Minds, and Suzanne Simard, forest ecologist and author of "When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World," discuss communication, connection, and the implications of treating animals and even forests as social beings.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Can you tell what's making these noises? And I'll give you one hint. It's a recording from Ocean Networks Canada. If you guessed whales, good job. If you guessed humpback song with sperm whale clicks, I am truly impressed. Okay, that's what was making the sounds, but what were they saying? Well, researchers are on it, and they're using AI to crack the code.

We dig into what science is finding out about the creatures around us and how it could change how we think about them and how we treat them. And it's not just animals. Turns out a lot of things around us have something to say. We sit down with forestry scientists and author Suzanne Samard to find out what trees talk about, and what we can and should learn from them. This is the run day. Artificial intelligence is helping researchers

unlock the world of animal communication, and what they're discovering could raise profound moral and legal questions. Kristen Andrews is a philosophy professor at York University and holds the York Research Chair in Animal Minds. She joins us in studio. Great to have you. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

There is a lot of excitement. in terms of the potential of using AI in order to communicate with animals. And I'm hoping you can help us understand how is AI currently being used to try and talk to animals? Well, right now we're trying to develop a two-way communication system between humans and other animals.

This is the dream. This has always been the dream, I think, for humans who've, since Dr. Doolittle, wanting to be able to talk to animals. So a two-way communication system would be a way, in which we could have a conversation with other animals. But we're not there yet. Well, tell me, what have we discovered so far?

So far, what we've discovered is that we might actually be able to create something like this because animals might have communication systems of the sort that might be construed of language, something that could be translated into language. And the reason we know this is because we've been seeing that animal communication systems have structure to them, something like human communication. that there's statistical regularities in the sounds that dolphins or whales make. We know that birdsong has recursion in it. These are features that were thought to be human unique at one point.

And now we're finding it. We're finding it in other animals as well. All right. Well, you talk about whales. So I want to talk about Project CETI, CETI, the CETATION Translation Initiative. And it found that sperm whales use 156 different click sounds. and they call it a phonetic alphabet. And last year they discovered that whale calls

resemble foul sounds, defining future of the human language. What does this tell us about whales' lives? Well, it doesn't tell us what they're like yet. What it tells us about whales' lives is that communicating with each other is really important to them, that they're really social

and they need to be able to do things together. We didn't know before that these communication systems were potentially so sophisticated, because what grammar lets us do, what the structure lets us do, is talk about new things and not just have like a few little symbols

that maybe means, you know, there's a boat coming or there's a predator here. They could potentially say things like, there's a big boat over here, or let's go to the boat, or let's stay away from the boat with this kind of structure. Another thing that's interesting is culture.

And again, we're still learning a little bit, but different whale songs can trace. from one group to another across the ocean. Think of like a hit song or a meme or something like that. Do you think whales have some sort of culture? Absolutely. Whales have culture. We're finding out that lots of non-human animals have cultures, in fact. So if you think about, as you described, this kind of revolution of whale song, where one group learned from another group, Akoda, and then they picked up this coda, picked up like this little piece of music, and then the next group heard them,

and then they started singing the song, and the song just spread throughout the ocean. We're seeing similar sorts of things in, say, like, killer whales, orcas, who in the 80s was really trendy for them to wear dead salmon on their head. To recall this, yes. And then that just, that was a fad. It died out. Is that a fashion statement? Was that?

It might have been a fashion statement. It might have been that there was just a lot of salmon that year. And so they could do things with them rather than eat them. Maybe it felt good. We don't know why they did it. But they did it. But then this died out. We didn't see it except it just came back a year ago.

They're doing it again. Just like us, what was cool in the 80s is cool again now. How about chimpanzees as well? Chimpanzees are where we first saw culture in non-human animals. And this, you know, one of the first observations was that chimpanzees in Mahale and Tanzania would groom each other while holding hands up in the air. And in Gombe, where Jane Goodall worked, chimpanzees didn't do that. And the scientists were flummoxed. They said, we thought we were studying chimpanzees, but actually we're studying Gombe chimpanzees and Mahale chimpanzees.

So just like humans have different greeting rituals, different languages, different cuisines. We're finding that chimpanzees have these differences too. We also are finding that chimpanzees have things that look like fashion statements. Like what? So in one community of chimpanzees, they started wearing a piece of grass in their ear, like a little earring. Just one ear. That was the cool thing. Spread to the whole group.

Then, like fads do, it changed, and they started wearing grass in their bum. Okay. So they've got like a short, spiky tail, and these chimpanzees are walking around with this new fashion trend. Very interesting. Okay. Sort of talking about, you mentioned the example of Dr. Doolittle. I mean we sort of romanticize or dream of what we can potentially do. But help us understand, you know, what can we realistically see with this tech and how far it can go when we talk about AI and our ability to talk to animals?

Well, the question, I guess, is really what can we say? What are we going to be saying to animals or what are we going to hear them say to us? And what the science right now, the science right now, we already know that non-human animals have, say, different alarm cries for different predators. Vervet monkeys will cry leopard and then all the monkeys will run up into the trees where they're safer from the leopards and they can distinguish eagles. They know when there's a stranger coming. So scientists have identified those sorts of things. The hope is that there's that non-human animals are saying more than that and that we will be able to have this two-way communication with them where we can ask them things like, do you mind if we are, you know, bringing tourists into your area or something like that? Is the boat traffic really noisy?

and that non-human animals could say things back to us about what their experiences are, what they like, what they don't like, and we can learn a lot from them as well. Is there a potential that we could see one day? I turn my phone on and I open an app and I communicate with my dog or cat using the technology and AI to have that two-way conversation.

So this is the goal of some of the research programs that are happening right now, that's something like Merlin, so you might, if you listen to a bird song, you know you can open Merlin, you can play it, and it will tell you what species is singing. What an app could potentially do is tell you what the bird is saying, and then you would push some other button, and it would translate it into birds' songs so the birds could hear what you were saying. There are rumors that there is a prize in development to create exactly this sort of technology to award the first group who can create a two-way app so that someone like you could just walk out into nature and have a conversation with an animal. That is the goal.

Not just scientists trying to figure out what animals are saying and trying to give, you know, say things back, which we've been doing for, you know, dozens of years. We've been teaching artificial languages to animals and so scientists are able to communicate with great apes and gorillas and orangutans to a certain extent. But the goal is that you could put this on your phone and have a conversation with another animal. I imagine it raises a few ethical questions as well. You know, on a point that you made,

the Atlantic magazine did a large story on using AI to talk to whales. And to pose the question, if we could talk to whales, what should we say to them? And I am curious, what do you think of them? What would you say to them if you could speak to a whale?

Yeah, I would ask a whale if they're being bothered by us, recording them and trying to talk to them. Because maybe the whales would just like to be left alone, right? At one point, human ancestors and whale ancestors were the same animal, and we diverged. And those mammals went back in the sea, and we stayed on land. And maybe they went back into the sea for a reason. Maybe they didn't want to hang out with us.

So I think it's really important for us to acknowledge that we are asking them to do something, like forcing this communication system on them when maybe they would just rather not have to deal with us. We have come a long way in terms of what we have learned about the inner lives of animals. Crows, for example, can recognize themselves in a mirror. We know that they can think about their own thoughts. And I am curious, what could this offer in terms of changing how we relate to animals that we don't already know? As we sort of navigate the animal kingdom and move forward, how do we, how does that change? Well, if you can have a conversation with someone, then you're already respecting them as a person with their own interests and goals. And I think if we are having conversations with non-human animals, we are forced to think about them as social partners.

as individuals who have rights and interests and who are part of our societies, actually, right? That they're not just some other, but we're in relationship with them. I think this is also true with the very attempt to have these conversations. So right now we're not having conversations with animals in these ways,

but all of these organizations that are trying to develop two-way communication with other animals, they think it's possible. And so they think other animals are the sorts of things who are conscious, who are smart, who have goals, who, you know, love each other, have friendships or hate each other, that there's a richness in non-human animal's lives that we might theoretically sometimes realize or watch a documentary and say, oh, yeah, look, the orangutan's so smart. But we don't experience until we are talking to them face-to-face.

Kristen, we're going to have to leave it there. I really appreciate this. Thank you so much for your insights. Yeah, thanks a lot. It was really fun talking to. Scientists, Suzanne Samard, has changed the way we understand trees and how they interact with the world around them. Rundown producer Eric Bombachino sat down with her to talk about her new book, When the Forest breathes, renewal and resilience in the natural world, and why she says trees are social creatures.

I want to welcome Suzanne Samard onto the program. Thank you for coming to hang out in our, I guess, our little bunkey here. It's really cool to be here. You are the author of the fantastic book When the Forest Breaves, Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World, and you are a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia.

So your work has, and I'll just go direct with this, it has changed my experience when I walk through a forest. So I thought maybe we could start there. If you and I are going through a walk right now, to understand how alive and communicative the forest is. Where do we start? Where should we look? Well, I think just be quiet with yourself and open yourself up to all of the dimensions that the forest is interacting with you. That includes the sounds, the wind, the smells, the crunch of the forest floor under your feet,

the chattering of the squirrels, the river that might be flowing by, your own heartbeat, and you become one with the forest. It might take a second, it might take a few minutes, it might take you an hour. You might have to sit down and do it, but it's a really important personal experience that helps you connect with your home. And underneath those footsteps and the crunch, there's a lot going on. There's a great quote from your book. My colleagues and I found that the below-ground linkages had patterned.

and suggestive of a biological neural network, that the trees have agency in the transmission of resources, and that together these properties are suggestive of a type of intelligence. Intelligence. How's so? Well, so this biological neural network is really this network or this web of these mycelium, which is part of the mycorrhizal system. So mycorrhizia is a fungus root association. Micorizor literally means fungus root. That web, you know, there's all kinds of compounds that are moving through that web of high fee all the time. And the web can actually link up trees together. It can link plants together and trees together, depending on the species that are involved. But that serves kind of like a pathway or like a telephone line

from tree to tree. And so the trees then can send messages. to each other. And those messages can include simple things like amino acids or sugars, or they can be information chemicals that are far more complex than that. And they are sending these messages in response to each other's needs, to their presence, what's happening with them. So there's this constant back and forth going on through this microisal network. It's also going on through the soil. And I would say just to expand things a little bit, there's also communication going on through the air. Oh, okay. So there's all these info chemicals going back. You can actually smell them when you're in the forest, right? What's the smell? That resiny smell or that bouquet.

Yeah. And those are trees that are communicating with each other about pollination or, you know, whether they're under stress. You know, they're emanating things like turpines that that are also sort of like insect warning signals. And so there is this constant conversation above and below ground between these trees and plants in the forest. Which feels like a form of intelligence? Which feels like a form of intelligence. And so when we looked at these mycorrhizal networks

and we actually made maps of them, and we analyzed the mathematical pattern of the linkages. And they followed what's called a biological neural network pattern. Okay. So they would look like the connections in your brain? They do, where you've got a few really large nodes and lots of little connecting nodes. That's what we have in our brains as well. And then you have these linkages where you're having this transmission of information.

The main chemical that's moving through the mycorrhizal network is a compound called glutamate. Glutamate is also the most common neurotransmitter in our brains. And so when I said it, it's a form of intelligence. I'm really talking about the physical structure and the physicality of the movement of information, the compounds, but it's also that the forest itself functions like an intelligent system. And your work in 1997 with the paper birch and the Douglas fir, who I guess we could say are great buddies,

how did you find out that they were able to share resources and communicate with each other? Yeah, so I was working in forests that I had worked in for a long, long time. And as a forest researcher, I was, you know, I was working for the Ministry of Forests in British Columbia at the time. And I was tasked with how to get rid of birch from these ecosystems. And, you know, it was at a time when the forest industry, and it still is as focused on this idea of competition. You've got to get rid of the competition for the conifers. And so, and I started seeing that when we did that, that the Douglas firs, when we got rid of,

of the birches were getting sick. And so I was interested in, well, there's more going on here than just competition. So I set up for my doctoral experiment, birch and fir and a neighbor cedar. And birch and fir share many mycorrhizal species in common and therefore can be linked together. Cedar forms another kind of mycorrhizzo called an arbustular microriza, and therefore has its other networks going on. Yeah, we've got a couple of cliques here. Yeah, we've got a couple of cliques here.

The cedar's not part of the clique. So I wanted to see whether or not birch and fir were in communication through these microisal networks or through the soil or whatever other avenue might be happening. And so I set up this experiment where I grew these triplets together, and I labeled the Douglas fir with carbon 14 and the paper birch with carbon 13, a different isotope of carbon. And then I traced where those isotopes went. And what I found is that moved from birch to fur and from fir to birch.

So it was going back and forth actually between the two trees. And then I did another thing is that I shaded Douglas fir with trying to emulate this idea that the foresters had was, well, you know, birch is going to shade Douglas fir and it's going to kill the fur. Right. So I thought, oh, I'll shade it. I'll shade Douglas fir, you know, sort of emulating the competition for light. And what I found, which is amazing, is that the more I shaded Douglas fir, the more carbon birch sent to fur. Okay. So this is real-time communication.

Yes, it is. And it also totally upsets their hypothesis that Birch is only a competitor. Right. What Birch is doing is it's facilitating fur even as it's shading it. So they really are in this dance together. You know, and I kind of interpreted that, that it's better for the whole community if they're both thriving. Right. So trees can be pals.

They can have little cliques. They can help each other when they need resources. and they share, but what about family members? Can trees recognize kin and family and behave differently? Yeah, so I'll sort of step a little bit back and talk about how we got to this question in the first place. So the micro-orizal network is in the forest, and so the next step was to, we wanted to map what these micro-arizal networks looked like. And, you know, I mentioned that it looks like a biological neural network with some big nodes and lots of little nodes. And so those big nodes were the big old trees.

So the biggest and oldest the tree, the more highly connected they were to all the other trees. And so then I started saying, well, what are these big old trees doing? And so we started looking at how regeneration happens around the old trees. First, I just did some experiments with my students where we would grow seed, like any old seed of a Douglas fir or seedling, connected to the network or not connected to the network. And we found that those that could tap into the network that was supported by these big old trees, those survived better. Okay. So that's cool.

So that means that these old trees are facilitating regeneration. So then the next question is, can they tell which ones are their own offspring? Would they benefit those ones even more? So we did a bunch of elaborate experiments with my grad students, especially Amanda Ease, was very instrumental in doing this work. and we grew kin seedlings and stranger seedlings. So kin meaning that they were from the seed of the parent tree and then a stranger from other trees that were nearby but not of the same parentage.

And we grew those with and without networks next to these mother trees. And we found that the kin seedlings had bigger root systems. They had more fitness traits, more buds, more height growth, and importantly, we traced carbon 13 moving from a sibling to another sibling, and we found that more moved to the kin. And that carbon ended up in the mycorrhises of the kin seedlings. So that also benefited them. Wow.

So family matters in the forest. Family matters. Kin recognition happens. You mentioned sending signals through the air. And I remember watching this. I think it was a Planet Earth documentary. and it had this type of monkeys. I think they were verbit monkeys.

And they would send each other warning sounds based on if it was a snake or an eagle. And it was this really aha moment for people of, oh, there's a lot of intelligence going on here. Can trees do the same thing? Do they send each other warning signals? So they do. And I'm not the only one who's looked at this,

but I'll tell you about what I've done with my group is that we grew Douglas firs and Ponderosa Pines. So in British Columbia, these are two important species. they're at the lower reach of the tree line, but in valley bottoms. And we started testing whether or not the Douglas fir and pine were in conversation or had a warning signal when they were being attacked by, in this case, by Western spruce budworm. And keeping in mind that those forests have been under a lot of stress from the mountain pine beetle, Western spruce buttworm outbreaks, and these are getting more amplified as climate is changing.

So it's important to know how these trees are responding. So we grew ponderosa pine and douglasfer in the lab, you know, that they normally grow side by side, and we infected the douglasfer with western spruce budworm and then traced its, you know, its physiology and its production of defense enzymes, which it immediately started to produce. And then it sends signals through its mycorrhizal network to the neighboring ponderosa pine, which is listening, and it upregulated its defense enzyme production, and it increases defense against the. budworm. So they were in communication and they were, you know, it was helping the neighbors be more resistant to the infection. This kind of work has been done elsewhere and other kinds

of plants with the information going through the air. Everything we've listed so far, if we saw those behaviors in a group of animals or mammals, we'd say, hey, okay, they're clearly intelligent and likely sentient. When we look at the forest, I'm curious of the one big difference is, other than lack of brains, is time scale. We have this bias of what communication is. It's this tennis match. We're engaged in it right now. That's what we've come to expect is communication and therefore intelligence. Do forests just move much slower? Well, they do. I mean, they're much longer lived. And yet they're slow and yet fast. So let me explain that. So, you know, a tree where I'm from, a cedar tree can grow 3,000 years of age or a Douglas firs, hundreds of years.

And so obviously the lifespan is much longer than our lifespan. So things happen over these long time scales. But it also happens really fast in that a tree is a microbiome, right? It's got fungi and bacteria and viruses associated with it that are all responding in much faster time. And so a tree, when you think of it as not. just a single organism. It's a multitude of organisms working together. It's operating on long time scales and fast time scales. So that means that it can respond over long periods, but also can be very adaptive in real time. I'm curious about some of the pushback you've gotten

just on saying there's a lot more going on in the forest. There is intelligence there. There is communication. Why the pushback on that? I think that, you know, especially in the Western world, Western science has long thought that plants were just inert and things, just like scenery. And that comes from removing ourselves from the natural world, which has been happening over the last thousand years, really, where, you know, we've separated mind from body, person from nature, we're objective observers of the environmental world, we're not part of the world. And so it's really easy to objectify plants and trees. and so, you know, I think that's why there's been so much pushback on the idea of intelligence

that they're not intelligent. Right. They're just these dumb plants. In fact, sometimes when we're insulting each other, we say, you're such a vegetable. Right. Or he's in a vegetative state. Yeah. Right?

It's like an insult. Yeah. And yet here there are these creatures that are much longer lived than us. They're very adaptive. They're very perceptive. They're very perceptive to us and to each other. They can perceive us in a certain way? They're aware of us?

Well, they can perceive all kinds of things. So I've done experiments where I've done things like, you know, pulled all the needles off a tree and then measured its physiological response. It's immediate. Right. Is that perception of what I'm, what me? I think it is. There's this great analogy I've always enjoyed about science.

And it's like ripples in a pond. And so some people can be on the middle ripple and see a bunch of ripples ahead of them. They'd be like, oh, everything's so certain. we know so much. But the folks that are on the edge of the ripple, like an Einstein or Carl Sagan, they see this great expanse of all this stuff we don't know. Do you think that relates to your relation to this science? You know, there's some things that are not going to be knowable.

But we know that it's this system that is complex adapting, changing all the time in it, and it's a self-regulating system. We don't have to know everything about it. that but we we know that it exists and that it's a you know it provides the scaffolding for life right I don't have to know everything about that and and actually you know lots of lots of us lots of people don't right they already know that the earth is a living system and that we're part of it and that how we behave you know in a reciprocal or non-reciprocal way with Mother Earth is

going to affect us yeah it doesn't take a genius like Einstein I think think to really understand that. And you don't have to know all the details. Make sure to tune in on June 3rd for the rest of their discussion when they'll be talking about how to support resilient forests. I'm Jan. Thanks for watching The Rundown. Does thinking about how everything from whales to trees could have their own language change how you feel about the natural world? Well, send us an email at rundown at tb0.org or drop us a comment and let us know. Until then, I will see you tomorrow. If you're enjoying this series, please consider supporting TVO with a donation to make more insightful and thought-provoking podcasts possible. TVO is a registered charity,

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