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Tai Asks Why

Season 2 – What are animals saying to each other?

VOICE: This is a CBC podcast.

[Truffles whining]

TAI: This is my producer Amanda's dog, Truffles. As you can hear, she's whining about something.

[Truffles barking]

TAI: OK. Well, now she's barking about something. But what really is she saying?

[Music]

TAI: I just kind of wonder, like, will I ever really know? Can we ever learn her language and just have a full on bark-versation? We'll never know if she's like, oh, my God, help I'm trapped in a dog's body or if truffles is just screaming for the sake of screaming. I know there have been a whole bunch of different times that humans have been able to teach animals how to communicate with us like there's that orangutan Tilda, that researchers taught how to mimic sounds like this.

[Tilda making sounds]

TAI: And then there was Koko, the gorilla who actually learned sign language. She even talked to Robin Williams.

ROBIN WILLIAMS: I recently had a mind-altering experience communicating with a gorilla. Her name is Koko.

TAI: Oh, and then there was Alex the parrot who did a step up from the both of them and could actually speak English. Like full on language here, guys.

IRENE: Alex, how many.

ALEX: 12.

IRENE: That's right.

ALEX: Can I have some water?

IRENE: Alright

TAI: He had a vocabulary of over one hundred words. And was the first and only non-human animal to have ever asked a question.

IRENE: What this shows us is that he really understands what those questions mean.

TAI: But, you know, that's not really the same as us learning their languages. You know, they're learning ours. Do they even have languages that we could speak to them in? And if they do, would we be able to learn it? Can we ever really know what animals are saying to each other?

[Tai theme song]

TAI: I'm Tai and this is my podcast, Tai Asks Why. There are just so many good questions out there that you really, really need to have answered. Why is space so dark? How do songs get stuck in your head? What is the science of bullying? What is deja vu? When the dinosaurs died, how did some other animals survive? And what are animals saying to each other? For those that are new to this show, this is my little brother Kien.

KIEN: Hello bromigo.

TAI: And I know this is going to sound strange, but he honestly thinks that he can talk to ducks.

KIEN: I am the duck lord.

TAI: Kien, explain yourself

KIEN: OK. I am the duck, lord. All ducks will bow down before me. Just joking because I'm not cruel and I let the ducks have their freedom. So I'm just like quack quack quack quack quack. And then they're like quack quack, and then I to get food and I feed them and they're like quack quack quack, which is duck thank you so much, you're great. And they're like quack, quack, quack, which means we should be friends, and they're like quack quack, catch you later.

TAI: So Kien, do you think these ducks have, like, something that's like a language?

KIEN: Yeah. Like, I summon them. They're like pretty fire ways they go quack quack quack quack quack. And they actually come.

TAI: Now, my mother actually backs Kien up on this.

NICKI: Yeah. We see them fly in over the village and they fly in over the house. Kien calls them, he stands on the deck and calls them and they fly in over the top of the houses and come in for landing on the river and and then just kind of swim up the river and jump up and Kien's there with his cucumbers and corn and all the things that you feed ducks. And they just chat.

KIEN: They love the cucumbers.

NICKI: They do.

TAI: I have to be real. Not a big believer. Kind of skeptical of this whole scheme. But I'm not a pessimist. I'm a scientist. So I really just think that Kien has train them because every time he quacks, he always gives them food. So I think the dogs have just learned that quacking, loud annoying brothers means food. So every time he quacks, they come to him for food. But I thought I'd run this theory by a fellow scientist, just to be sure.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Well, I haven't observed your brother's behavior with ducks, but if he has gotten them conditioned by food to whenever he arrives, they may be attracted to him by the food. Of course, if he spends time observing their behavior, he might have some insight into how the ducks behave. But I'd have to watch him to know for sure.

TAI: This is Kathleen Dudzinski. She's the director of the Dolphin Communication Project. She spent the last 30 years studying dolphins in the way that they communicate. And she says that when it comes to learning what any animals are saying to each other, the key is observation.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: You have to watch what they do, and so you want to look at what they do, maybe what they say in terms of verbal signals with one another, but also what the context is. So let me ask you this. If you see a mother and her child walking down a sidewalk and they suddenly grab hands, why do you think they might have grabbed hands?

TAI: Safety, maybe something might have popped up. Maybe they're crossing the road.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Right. But if I tell you that they're not actually walking on a sidewalk of a busy street, but they're actually walking down a sidewalk in a park, then the reasons why they might have grabbed hands are narrowed.

TAI: Cause they like each other, because they love each other.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Yep. So that's the context, whether you're on a sidewalk of a busy street or you're in a park and that gives you information that helps you assess what that signal might mean. And so with people, we can actually because we share a language with people, we can actually ask them what do those signals mean?

TAI: We can provide context.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Right. But with other animals, we don't really have that option to sit down and have a conversation. But we can share information through a variety of signals.

[Music]

TAI: So for instance, with your pet dog, you might learn through observation that if they're like clawing at their bowl means that they're hungry, they're scratching at the window, that means they want to go outside. And all of these are the types of signals that Kathleen has been studying with dolphins all these years. So what are some of the ways that dolphins use signals? And, you know, what are some of the different signals?

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Well, one of the behaviors that I've studied for the last decade and a half is how they share contact or touch or rubs with their pectoral fin. And so where and how a contact happens on the body of another dolphin gives a different meaning. So, for example, flipper to flipper or peck fin to peck fan contacts is kind of like a greeting, you know, a handshake or a wave. Hi.

TAI: Mm hmm. It's kind of like with humans, like if I were to like to be like high fived you, and I slapedp their hand. That means one thing. If I'm mad at someone I'm gonna slap their face.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Yeah. And so it's the same with dolphins. If they're disciplining another dolphin or if they're upset with another dolphin, they might whack them with their tail or they might ram them and hit them with their rostrum. And so that's an aggressive signal as opposed to taking their peck fin and rubbing the side of their body. And that's more like a pat on the back.

TAI: Good job, man.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Exactly.

[Music]

TAI: And that's just the fin touching signals. Kathleen tells me that dolphins have a whole bunch of other ways of communicating with body language, gestures, postures and snazzy sounds.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: They make clicks and whistles and buzzes and burst pulses.

TAI: I haven't heard of burst pulses. Am I living under a rock or is that like a very unique thing to dolphins?

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Well, you're not living under a rock. The higher repetition clicks that are squawks or buzzes. They're called burst pulses. And those are thought to actually contain more of an emotional content and be used when dolphins are interacting with other dolphins.

TAI: But how do we know that what we've built for language will be consistent throughout every animal's form of language?

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: We don't. And when you study the behavior of another animal species, you have to try really hard not to put our own assumptions for how we communicate on to other animals.

TAI: Yeah. So how do you figure out, you know, the meaning of cues objectively? Like how are you able to figure out that this means affection instead of like I'm about to eat you?

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Well, one of the things that we do is we spend hours documenting the behaviors for every hour of data that we collect, we have about 30 hours of analysis time and over more than 25 years we have nearing 500 hours of video. So by having that large of a sample size where we know who initiates that behavior, who receives it and in what context those behaviors are occurring, then we get an idea based on what the numbers are and we can start to get an idea of what the interpretation is.

TAI: Yeah. It makes sense. Like, you know, if certain things keep happening, you might be able to figure things out.

KATHLEEN DUDZINKSI: Right. It's all in the numbers.

TAI: Wow, that's a lot of time watching videos of dolphins.

[Music]

TAI: So after talking to Kathleen, it seems like the key to figuring out what animals are saying to each other is just to spend a lot and I mean a lot of time just observing them. Seeing who says what and that watching out for what happens next. But how do you study like that when you can't see these animals. You know, when you're in the darkest places on the planet? What are the animals down there saying to each other?

EDIE WIDDER: Well, that was my question when I first dove in a diving suit back in the 80's and saw all of this light. I wondered, what are they saying to each other? What is all of this light mean? And so a lot of my career has been spent trying to figure that out and basically talk to the animals.

TAI: This is Edie Widder.

EDIE WIDDER: Hi Tai

TAI: Edie is the CEO and senior scientist of the Ocean Research and Conservation Association. And she's a deep sea explorer who has found a way to talk with animals in the darkest parts of the ocean.

EDIE WIDDER: I was the first person to try to communicate with different types of imitations of the bioluminiescence displays in the ocean. I discovered that if I imitated certain displays, I could get the animals to respond to them. So I felt like I was talking to them anyway.

TAI: So cool right guys? Like if you don't know what bioluminescence is, it's the way that certain animals emit light from their bodies. They just glow.

EDIE WIDDER: Bioluminescence is living light. It's most familiar as fireflies. But there are actually quite a large number of animals on this planet that can make light, most of them in the ocean. In fact, in the open ocean environment, the majority of animals make light.

TAI: Edie says that the reason they make this light is to talk to each other. She calls bioluminescence the language of light.

EDIE WIDDER: It may actually be the most common form of communication on the planet.

TAI: In order to talk to animals in their light language, Edie sets up a camera at the bottom of the ocean that she calls the eye of the sea and then uses her own light system that can imitate different types of bioluminescent displays. She calls this the electronic jellyfish.

EDIE WIDDER: And 86 seconds after it came on for the first time, we saw a squid over six feet long attack it.

TAI: No

EDIE WIDDER: And it was a squid so new to science, it could not be placed in any nonscientific family. So not only had I proven that I had figured out enough about how to communicate with these animals to actually draw one in, but my method of exploring unobtrusively was, as I indicated, likely to see things we've never seen before because our methods of exploring have scared so many animals away in the past. And apparently it's consistent cause we just did it last week again, this time in Gulf of Mexico, about 100 miles southeast of Louisiana. We have got another sighting of a giant squid.

TAI: What's the giant squid like?

EDIE WIDDER: Well, the one off Japan was as tall as a two-story building.

TAI: What?

EDIE WIDDER: Yeah, it's like my guess that they say they can get as tall as a four story building.

TAI: Oh, no, that's that's four stories. That's big guy. That's like eat my house is a snack thing. That must be so terrifying. And at the same time, so exciting. Just be at the bottom of the ocean in the dark. Then you turn on your jellyfish light and bam giant squid right off the bat. I don't know why, but I just kind of feel like that would happen to me, I would get stage fright if I had to talk to something as big as that. Do you ever really feel like you, you know, communicate with them? You have a conversation, a real conversation.

EDIE WIDDER: Yeah. The closest I've ever come to what I thought was a conversation was with the eye in the sea in the Bahamas. I was producing a display that was a series of flashes of light.

[Music]

EDIE WIDDER: And every time I did that, there was something out there that would flash back and it would do it in a really interesting way. I think it was a shrimp and it would squirt out a string of dots, but in kind of a curly cue. And so I think the conversation I was having was a sexy one, that it was attracting a mate, but I can't be sure.

TAI: OK. OK, sorry that's just kind of.

EDIE WIDDER: You can deal with it.

TAI: Yeah. But how do you know that this bioluminescence is, in fact them trying to communicate with each other instead of being like just flashing just to be cool? You know, it's the new hip thing. All the kids are doing it.

EDIE WIDDER: Because that would get you killed in in the deep sea. You don't want to use your lights indiscriminately because then you're just making yourself visible to all those predators.

TAI: Yeah, that's pretty logical.

TAI: The deep ocean seems like a really intense place. These animals aren't just floating around gossiping, lying on the seabed bed, just talking about seaweed, all that good stuff. Their communication is like, oh my God, I'm being eaten, you know, and it's really cool that Edie's able to actually share these signals with them. It just really feels like that's the first step to really learning their language. Do you have conversations with your fishy friends?

EDIE WIDDER: No, but I communion with them in my own way. It's it's one of my favorite places to be on the planet is 3000 feet down at the end of a dive, and we turn out all the lights and come up through the water column and just see this amazing light show and all of these different animals flashing their different types of lights. And it's kind of a zen state that you go into, and I guess that's kind of a communication and an appreciation of the life forms that constitute life on this planet.

TAI: Do you think it's possible that we would be able to understand, like what we ever really be able to just fully talk to these organisms?

EDIE WIDDER: I think in the sense that you're meaning, probably not, but we could certainly learn a lot more about how they're using their language of light if we would focus a little bit more on exploring where they live and how they live, which is kind of important because this is the only rock in the universe that we know of that sustains life. And I think we need to be spending a little bit more time and effort trying to figure out how that's accomplished.

TAI: It's so nice picturing Edie down there at the bottom of the ocean watching these wild light displays. Just seems so cool and really nice, you know, really sweet. And she's really right. We need to pay a lot more attention and more respect for these animals because maybe understanding them could help us talk with other things on other planets.

[Music]

TAI: Or at least that's what this guy thinks.

LAURANCE DOYLE: We spent some time staring up at the stars and saying, are we alone and there's these dolphins tugging at our sleeves, going hablas espanol and parlez-vous francais and try and everything. So, you know, we have to make a bit of a greater effort to communicate with them.

TAI: This is Laurance Doyle. He's a principal investigator at the SETI Institute, which stands for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Since 1984, SETI has been looking and listening out for transmissions from civilizations on other planets spooky. What Lawrence is working on is a little bit different.

LAURANCE DOYLE: We probably will be the first to detect any kind of elite signal. Trouble is, we have to broaden what that means. You know, what SETI has done so far is ask the question, is there a transmitter? But so far SETI has not looked at the message.

TAI: And Lawrence thinks that in order to detect and understand intelligent alien messages, we need to totally reimagine what we think by intelligence and we can start by looking right here on Earth.

LAURANCE DOYLE: What if you define intelligence as the ability to be self-sufficient based on sunshine? Well, you know, plants have it all over us. They make their own food and eat it. Where as we just eat. So, yeah, how do you tell an alien from something that's completely different here on Earth? And I think we're missing a lot. We have measured intelligence on Earth by how much they are like humans. And Ia m going up to Alaska this summer to record some humpback whales and you know a humpback whale weighs 50 tons and it comes up next to you and breathes on you. You suddenly realize that, you know, the aliens are probably not going to want to discuss PI or the golden ratio. You know, they're going to be very different. We're proposing by setting non-humans as well as human languages, we can come up with intelligence filters, set look at the message and then we can tell if it's intelligence. In other words, if they have a complex communication system.

TAI: So what exactly is this intelligence filter?

LAURANCE DOYLE: Well, it turns out then in the 50's, a linguist named George Zipf [z-i-p-f]. He discovered that if he plotted the frequency of occurrence of words in English, for example, he'd take the most used words, the second, most, third, most, and so on, and he'd put them on a graph and he drew a line, a straight line through them, and it had this minus one 45 degree slope. And he thought, well, that's kind of interesting. What if I do it with Chinese book? What if he did it with Russian phonemes? So you did a whole bunch of languages and it all turned out to have a minus 1 slope and it was called Zipf's Law. And it turns out that it's a necessary condition for a complex language. And in other words, if your language obeys Zipf's law, then you've got grammatical and syntactical rules. So we were the first to plot to see if dolphins obey Zipf's Law. And bottlenose dolphins do, and so do humpback whales, and so do orcas and squirrel monkeys do not, and ground squirrels do not. And the rumble of elephants we're still working on. And it's just an amazing tool kit gives you insights. I've even applied it to communication system between cotton plants and wasps. This cotton plant has a way of chemically communicating with a wasp, telling it what plants to land on. So it's kind of an air traffic control system. And I wrote a paper about it.

TAI: I would definitely read that paper.

LAURANCE DOYLE: Oh, I'll send it to you.

TAI: Cool. So humans follow this trend because, you know, our language is pretty sophisticated. And dolphins follow it because their clicks are sophisticated. Aliens, will they follow this law, too?

LAURANCE DOYLE: That's a very good question. If you wish to transmit knowledge, you have to follow the rules of information theory. And in general, Zipf's law.

TAI: Mm hmm. So just generally, how does communication with animals like dolphins, whales. How does that help us find these aliens?

LAURANCE DOYLE: Well, if you get an alien signal and you classify the signals, right, then you can look at the message and see it obeys Zipf's law.

[Music]

LAURANCE DOYLE: Some people say anthropologists, that the complexity of human language is a result of the complexity of our society. So in some sense, if you can measure the complexity of an alien message, you'll be measuring the complexity of an alien society. And it doesn't mean you can directly translate yet, but it's a step in the right direction.

TAI: So now we're able to understand that whales and dolphins aren't just going bleh. We now know that they're making intelligible communication, but then that raises the question, will we ever really understand what they're saying?

LAURANCE DOYLE: You know, I hope so. There is in principle no reason we shouldn't progress the point where we can have a conversation with a humpback whale.

[Humpback whale sounds]

TAI: Wow. So I guess it is maybe possible that we could really have conversations with dogs or a duck.

[Music]

TAI: I guess we just need to be like Kathleen; spend a lot of time observing what signals are being used and then find ways to mimic these signals like Edie and then use Zipf's law to figure out how complex these languages are. So it sounds like hard work and dedication. And I know Kien isn't like super enthusiastic about large amount of work. So I feel the need to ask. Kien why would it interest you to speak up?

KIEN: I just think it's pretty cool having a way to communicate to something. It's just like ducks are cool because birds are cool and life is cool. Quack quack [continues quacking].

[Music]

TAI: We want to listen. We want to learn. We want to achieve. He's for harmony. Thank you so much for listening I'm Tai Poole. This show is produced by Veronica Simmonds and Amanda Buckiewicz. Today, my guests were Edie Witter, Laurance Doyle, Kathleen Dudzinski, and another thanks to Sonya Buyting for the editorial assistance. Special thanks to Kien for telling me about his great passion of ducks. The theme music is by Johnny Spence and another big round of applause to Johnny for helping me write and record the animal talk song.

KIEN: Next time on Tai Asks Why: Deja vu.

VOICE: I think déjà vu is is caused by like a little glitch, glitch in the memory system where you have two feelings at the same time. You have the feeling that you find something familiar and at the same time is that you also know that that familiarity is false.

TAI: Till next time I'm Tai. Keep quacking why?

VOICE: For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.ca/podcasts

TRANSCRIPT: Tai Asks Why - Season 2: What are animals saying to each other?

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