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A $100,000 prize for communicating with animals has been scooped by researchers who have shed light on the meaning of dolphins’ whistles.
The Coller-Dolittle Prize for Two-way Inter-species Communication was launched last year by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University.
The winning team, the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program led by Laela Sayigh and Peter Tyack from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, has been studying bottle-nosed dolphins in waters near Sarasota, Florida, for more than four decades.
The researchers used non-invasive technologies such as hydrophones and digital acoustic tags attached by suction cups to record the animals’ sounds. These include name-like “signature” whistles, as well as “non-signature” whistles – sounds that make up about 50% of the animals’ calls but are poorly understood.
In their latest work, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team identified at least 20 different types of non-signature whistle that are produced by multiple dolphins, finding two types were each shared by at least 25 individuals.
When the researchers played these two sounds back to dolphins they found one triggered avoidance in the animals, suggesting it could be an alarm signal, while the other triggered a range of responses, suggesting it could be a sound made by dolphins when they encounter something unexpected.
Sayigh said the win was a surprise, adding: “I really didn’t expect it, so I am beyond thrilled. It is such an honour.”
The judging panel was led by Yossi Yovel, professor of zoology at Tel Aviv University, whose own team has previously used machine-learning algorithms to unpick the meaning of squeaks made by bats as they argue.
“We were mostly impressed by the long term, huge dataset that was created, and we’re sure that it will lead to many more new and interesting results,” said Yovel, adding the judges were also impressed by team’s use of non-invasive technology to record the animals’ calls, and the use of drones and speakers to demonstrate the dolphins’ responses in the field.
Yovel added the judges hoped the prize would aid the application of AI to the data to reveal even more impressive results.
Jonathan Birch, aprofessor of philosophy at London School of Economics and one of the judges, said the main thing stopping humans from cracking the code of animal communication was a lack of data.
“Think of the trillion words needed to train a large language model like ChatGPT. We don’t have anything like this for other animals,” he said.
“That’s why we need programs like the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which has built up an extraordinary library of dolphin whistles over 40 years. The cumulative result of all that work is that Laela Sayigh and her team can now use deep learning to analyse the whistles and perhaps, one day, crack the code.”
Yovel said about 20 teams entered this year’s competition, resulting in four finalists. Besides Sayigh and Tyack’s team, these included teams working on understanding communication in nightingales, cuttlefish, and marmosets. He added the 202-26 prize was now open for applications.
As well as an annual award of $100,000, there is also a grand prize up for grabs totalling either $10m in investment or $500,000 in cash. To win that, researchers must develop an algorithm to allow an animal to “communicate independently without recognising that it is communicating with humans” – something Jeremy Coller suggested might be achieved within the next five years.
The challenge is inspired by the Turing test for AI, whereby humans must be unable to tell whether they are conversing with a computer or a real person for the system to be deemed successful.
Robert Seyfarth, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the prize, welcomed the win. “These are outstanding scientists, doing work that has revolutionised our understanding of dolphin communication and cognition. This is well-deserved recognition,” he said.
Clara Mancini, professor of animal-computer interaction at the Open University, said the dolphin work showed technology’s potential to advance our understanding of animal communication, possibly one day even enabling people to communicate with them on their own terms.
“I think one of the main benefits of these advances is that they could finally demonstrate that animals’ communication systems can be just as sophisticated and effective for use in the environments in which their users have evolved, as human language is for our species,” she said.
“However, on the journey towards interspecies communication, I would suggest, we need to remain mindful that deciphering a language is not the same as understanding the experience of language users and that, as well as curiosity, the challenge requires humility and respect for the unique knowledge and worldview that each species possesses.”
