In what may well be a breakthrough in interspecies communication between humans and dolphins, scientists have developed a way to identify and decipher sounds in the dolphin ‘vocabulary’ using artificial intelligence (AI), with more improvements underway.
Specifically, researchers are planning to apply AI to about forty years’ worth of recordings of bottlenose dolphins, and have won the first annual prize in a contest called the Coller Dolittle Challenge, which rewards AI use that achieves a ‘breakthrough’ in interspecies communication, Nature reported on May 16.
Organized by the Jeremy Coller Foundation in London, which funds projects related to animal welfare and the like, the contest launched a year ago in partnership with Tel Aviv University in Israel, and envisions awarding annual prizes for research that employs AI toward understanding how animals communicate.
That said, according to Yoss Yovel, a neuroecologist at Tel Aviv University and chair of the award’s scientific committee, the ultimate goal of the contest, giving away either $500,000 in cash or $10 million in investments, “is indeed what we call two-way, multi-context communication with an animal using the animal’s own signals.”
Progress toward interspecies communication
Meanwhile, the team that won the award, headed by Laela Sayigh, a biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, has spent decades studying a community of about 170 bottlenose dolphins in Sarasota Bay, Florida, recording their sounds since 1984.
Over time, they have catalogued most of the dolphins’ ‘signature whistles,’ which refer to sounds that function like names and help individual dolphins identify each other. Other ‘non-signature whistles’ are more challenging for study, which is why they haven’t received as much attention.
Per Sayigh:
“Since we know the signature whistles of most dolphins in the Sarasota community, we had a unique research opportunity. (…) We have now identified more than 20 repeated, shared non-signature whistle types.”
As it happens, the researchers played back some of the shared whistles and observed how the dolphins would react to them, which allowed them to begin uncovering their meaning.
For example, the dolphins would approach speakers playing certain sounds, while swimming away from others, which means the former functioned to initiate contact, and the latter were some kind of alarm.
Going forward, the scientists intend to continue growing their database of dolphin vocabulary and discern the meaning of various other sounds.
Elsewhere, dolphins could be more aware than we credit them for, as researchers have linked emotions to animal consciousness, observing animals displaying optimism through vocalizations and actions like play, which had no evolutionary reason other than to have fun, suggesting conscious experience.
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