Dr Arik Kershenbaum is a zoologist at the University of Cambridge who specializes in animal communication, studying wolves, gibbons and dolphins to “understand more not only about their ecology and conservation, but also about the evolution of our own language” . His first book, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Milky Waythat speculated about alien life came out in 2020. His new book, Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communicationwill be published on January 25.
Why did you decide to write this book?
My previous book was unusual and dealt with quite radical ideas. But I really wanted to write about what I do in my day job. And it appeals to everyone: we all want to know if animals talk and what they say. Although there is a strange split personality about this: on the one hand we want animals to talk; but on the other hand we are afraid of talking animals because it would mean we are not quite as special as we thought.
You trekked to remote Vietnamese jungles and braved harsh winters Yellowstone to get close to gibbons and wolves. What are the difficulties in observing animal communication in the wild?
Most of these animals don’t really want you around. With wolves it is extremely difficult because they are active at night, so you have to use sound. This is one of the reasons why there are so many [research] on wolf howl because most of the time it’s really hard to see them. You can’t trap and GPS collar every animal – it’s very difficult and expensive.
What techniques do you use to get around these problems?
Our big hack is passive acoustic localization. We set up a lot of recording devices and we triangulate the position of animals using their sounds, which means we don’t have to collar them or even see them. As long as they call, we know where they are.
I was interested to learn that dolphins have names, or at least distinctive whistles…
This has been a major focus of research. What are these signature whistles for? How do they originate? We don’t know that much yet. You can tell a wolf by the characteristics of its howl, but that is not the same thing as being a name, and others will not imitate it. So why do dolphins do this? Almost certainly, it has something to do with underwater visibility. Maintaining a cohesive social group when you can’t really see where someone is means you have to rely on sound.
You describe the parrots as the interlocutors of the bird world. How did they become so vocal?
Parrots are unusual. They are definitely some branch of the evolutionary bird tree. They’ve specialized in very complex and difficult environments and they have to solve puzzles, like accessing hard-to-find foods that ripen at unexpected times, in a way that, say, a redhead doesn’t. They also live in social groups. In addition to the physical ability to make sounds and the intelligence to make sense of them, you need a reason to use these sounds – and living in herds is one.
Language was used to distinguish humans from other animals: we can speak, they can’t, therefore we are better. Should we get rid of that idea altogether?
There is no doubt that our behavior and our ability to manipulate the world are qualitatively different from other animals. And we can say it is because of language. There is no way we could have created human civilization without language. So I am not downplaying its importance. I think we are the only species on earth with language. But I don’t think it’s useful to use it as a distinction. It’s an observation: we’ve evolved something that other animals haven’t, they’ve evolved things we haven’t. It would be nice to have wings, but we don’t. I don’t feel bad about it. And I don’t feel bad that animals don’t have language either.
Does it make sense to ask which animal comes closest to the language ability of humans? Or do various animals approach in different ways?
The latter. One of the most important things is that there is no sense in which animals evolve to have a language. If that were the case, then you might ask, “Who went the farthest on the road to language?” But it isn’t. If there were evolutionary drives for dolphins to have language, they would have. But we don’t see them at the point. So what this tells us is that in their niche – their environment and the context in which they live – language is not what they need.
It is only when we bring animals into our domain that certain underlying linguistic abilities can begin to emerge…
This is most obvious with parrots: they seem to be able to learn real language, but they certainly don’t use it in nature. So it’s an interesting observation, that whatever our brains that understand language have, their brains don’t lack it. But that’s clearly just not what they need.
Why is it important to pay attention to animal communication now?
One answer is that AI is becoming a big thing. Many people use AI to try to decode or translate animal language. It is certainly true that modern AI tools are getting closer to recognizing different emotions, different messages, different information. So even if there is no language, it would be nice to be able to interpret a wolf howl as a wolf interprets a wolf howl. It will be quite transformative in our relationship with the wild world, because we have a lot of conflict with animals. For example, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say to wolves: “Go away!” We have a lot of conservation issues, so it wouldn’t be helpful to be able to hear a gibbon saying, “Oh shit, there’s no food here.”
Aside from AI, we are at an environmental crisis point. Increasing awareness of what our fellow creatures on the planet are going through, and how they are changing, will be helpful. This is a time when we need to pay much more attention to what nature is saying, and you can’t do that if you only listen to what you want to hear what we have done so far.
Do you encounter accents in any of the animals you work with?
Yes, and they are interesting because they demonstrate the way two isolated populations will drift apart genetically, culturally and communicatively. In my newspaper on hyraxes [herbivorous mammals found in Africa and the Middle East]you saw this very interesting phenomenon where you had a series of colonies in a straight line along a valley, and any two adjacent communities were similar [in terms of syntax in their song]but the further you went, the more different they became.
You are a member of the board of advisors for METI.org (Messages from extraterrestrial intelligence). What are the chances that if we met strangers, we would be able to talk to them?
I would say extremely high. If we meet aliens, it means that they came here and that they have technology that is far beyond ours. If I were sent to another planet to talk to intelligent aliens, I would go to great lengths to make sure we had a way to communicate.
