Thank you! I really appreciate that!

I think you’ve accurately assessed the situation.

I think most people would be really surprised by what has already been uncovered. For example, prairie dogs have had their communication decoded to the point where we can identify adjectives, nouns, and verbs. We can tell if a prairie dog is seeing a person in a red shirt or a person in a white shirt.

For anyone interested, we have a community about this! !digitalbioacoustics@lemmy.world

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Scientific paper with some visualizations:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.11636

My understanding is that 14% of the time that a chimp made a gesture to another chimp, there was a gesture used as a response. The result of this would be that there are not many long conversations happening with gestures, but like the paper said, they did see one that went on for 7 rounds.

Many animals do use call and response in communication, but long back and forth conversations are quite rare. Whales of some species have especially long back and forth communications. Sometimes, even for over an hour at a time, they will float near the surface and go back and forth, making sounds to each other. There was even a study earlier this year where humans had a 10+ minute back and forth with a humpback whale named “Twain”. The conversation was essentially both sides going back and forth, claiming to be Twain.

Sperm whales also have long, distinct back and forth conversations. They have even been found to have certain types of calls that, when made by the dominant individual, indicate that the conversation is coming to an end. They have not decoded the meanings of their calls yet, but they have very complex structures that resemble human language in many ways. They have small units that are location/tribe dependent(think accents) that are combined into larger units that follow fairly predictable rules.

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I’ve not tried much, but it has worked for me from a normal Gmail address.

They are already training for their takeover!

When It Comes to Waging War, Ants and Humans Have a Lot in Common

Maybe you would enjoy this radiolab podcast if you haven’t heard it before.

We’ll kick off the chase with Diana Deutsch, a professor specializing in the psychology of music, who could extract song out even the most monotonous of drones. (Think Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller. Bueller … Bueller …)

For those of us who have trouble staying in tune when we sing, Deutsch has some exciting news—the problem might not be your ears, but your language. She tells us about tone languages such as Mandarin and Vietnamese which rely on pitch to convey the meaning of a word. Turns out, speakers of tone languages are exponentially more inclined to have absolute—aka ‘perfect’—pitch. And, nope, English isn’t one of them.

This looks neat! I don’t remember it at all, Thanks!

Oh yeah! These things are great. We’ve had a few posts in here about them. I know some people debate whether or not the dogs really understand what they are doing. Sometimes people will say that they are just filming so much and sharing the most impressive videos. I don’t know though, there are certainly some really convincing ones.

I wonder if anyone is working on any sort of AI tutor for dogs with this idea.

Yeah, it has been relatively untouched even by fiction. Star Trek IV has some in it. The series Made For Love as well, but not in a very series way. I’d love to know of more. Oh, the children’s movie UP has those headsets for talking dogs.

Totally not due to science or anything, but the comedy series Wilfred with Elijah Wood is fantastic and certainly involves human-animal conversation.

Yeah, for sure, there is always something to be learning. I’ve just left my computer for a month to try to decompress some. I’ve taken up card magic while away from it and have really been enjoying it. Even with no computer, I’m still so often on my phone, just tending more towards listening to things.

I’ve not been paying as much attention to the animal world as I was last year and the beginning of this year. For a while, I was making sure I read and shared at least one article or paper a day.

Seriously!! My reading list’s growth is badly outpacing my reading speed. I don’t see this problem going away either. It’s the same with podcasts, I download at least 5x more podcasts than what actually get around to listening to. I’m looking forward to a good AI audio podcast summary tool.

Yeah, An Immense World is definitely a great one. It’s still one of the best I’ve read in the last couple of years. I’d go for it over How To Speak Whale just for its well roundedness, it really made me think differently about the various ways different species may be experiencing the world.

Yeah, it’s a shame that wind farms are messing with whales. I hadn’t heard that about blue whale jaws, very interesting.

There is a good book by Tom Mustill called “How to Speak Whale”. It covers quite a bit of ceracean communication. It talks a bit about the work Roger Payne as well, which I believe we talked a out awhile back.

I haven’t heard anything about larger whales, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I have read that many beached dolphins are deaf. The oceans are so much louder now from boats and machinery that it is causing lots of issues for animals whose primary sense is hearing.

Very interesting read. Thanks for sharing it! I remember reading that bats need to avoid hearing damage from their own echolocation calls because they are so loud(although out of human hearing range). They are actually able to close their ears at the exact time thay they make the calls.