Listening to the secret language of animals
We talk to the animals. Well, mostly not, for now. But new sensors are recording what they have to say to each other in unprecedented detail, and and AI is able to help scientists process these vast new datasets. Producing some very interesting results.
“…bats have much more complex language than we previously understood. Bats argue over food; they actually distinguish between genders when they communicate with one another; they have individual names, or “signature calls.” Mother bats speak to their babies in an equivalent of “motherese.” But whereas human mothers raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies, mother bats lower the pitch”
And when it comes to bees, we’re actually able to talk back, thanks to the “robo-bee”.
“Landgraf’s honeybee robot can tell the other bees to stop, and they do. It can also do something more complicated, which is the very famous waggle dance—it’s the communication pattern they use to convey the location of a nectar source to other honeybees. This is a very easy experiment to run, in a way, because you put a nectar source in a place where no honeybees from the hive have visited, you then instruct the robot to tell the honeybees where the nectar source is, and then you check whether the bees fly there successfully. And indeed they do.”
Further reading: Primo Levi’s short story “Full Employment” which imagines the possibilities of talking – and trading – with insects.