AI programs used to create animal dictionaries and translators

Having used AI datasets to map language patterns in recordings of various species, scientists are now searching for a digital 'Rosetta Stone' to unlock animal sound meanings, in the same way archaeologists discovered the meanings of ancient languages.

"It is in the realm of possibility, although not yet achieved that one day we could have a zoological version of Google translate," Dr Karen Bakker, author of The Sounds Of Life told the DLD Conference in early 2023.

"So imagine, in addition to German, or English or Cantonese, or Cree, you might have an option for southern Australian dolphin, east African elephant, or sperm whalish."

Throughout the course of the research, scientists have discovered that there is a lot of communication between different species. Quite simply, animals tend to be fairly chatty with each other!

One of the most prominent ways this shows up is between pollinators and plants.

"Honeybees, if you play the frequency of a buzzing honeybee near a flower, it will respond by producing more nectar, and sweeter nectar," Dr Bakker said.

"Plants emit very high ultrasound and that ultrasound will vary depending on whether they are dehydrated or they're stressed or they're healthy - sounds that insects can hear and AI algorithms can be trained to listen to plants and indicate what state the plant is in, healthy or not."

Often maligned as creatures of the darkness, bats are quite similar to humans in their patterns of language learning.

"Bats are often associated in western cultures with blood-sucking vampires of the night, vectors of zoonotic disease, but it turns out they're more similar to you than you might believe," Dr Baker told the DLD Conference in January 2023.

"It turns out bats congregate, they make friends, they remember favours, they hold grudges, they have individual names, they speak to one another and use those names to identify gender, kin, family."

"Baby bats learn to speak just like you learned to speak. Your parents spoke to you and you babbled back to them until you learned the words in your language, that's exactly what bats do."

Using distinct soundscapes, scientists have also relocated species that were thought to be extinct. A whole new subfamily of blue whales has been discovered in the Indian Ocean based on the mapping of its unique sonic imprint.

"A camera can spot an animal walking down a path, but a microphone can hear them hiding in the bushes," Dr Bakker said.

But scientists do have some ethical concerns over the ways the recordings may be used.

Without many ethical guard rails in place, hunters, for example, may be able to communicate with certain animals to manipulate populations out of hiding for a cull.

"It's quite likely we wouldn't know what we were saying to other species, and there's potential for that to be quite harmful," Dr Bakker told Google in 2023.

Whether or not animals actually want to communicate with humans is another concern for scientists.

"We haven't asked for consent. We simply don't know if other species would want to speak to us, what to be recorded."