fascinating article on animal language - SLNY

June 10, 2022 6:33 AM

This New Yorker article explores various bits of research into animal language. Not super in depth but definitely a jumping off place if this intrigues you.
posted by leslies (12 comments total)

This is tangentially interesting on this same topic (animal language and how language shapes perception): The Dolittle Machine.
posted by offmessage at 7:13 AM on June 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this.

Brings to mind this article: The Crow Whisperer. What happens when we talk to animals?

Also, people should stop eating animals.
posted by Ayn Marx at 7:23 AM on June 10, 2022 [4 favorites]

I recently had the pleasure of reading Carl Safina's 'Becoming Wild,' which is about animal cultures, and is completely fascinating. It talks a lot about sperm whale communication and social groupings, for example, and also has some fascinating discussion of animal learning and teaching.
posted by kaibutsu at 7:34 AM on June 10, 2022 [2 favorites]

I've been obsessed with ghost knifefish since I discovered they existed during grad school interviews in 2012. Did you know that the pulses they send to sense their environments are modulated by qualities of the fish itself, like sex, and that they also communicate with one another by varying frequency and amplitude of their pulses? Electroception is more like fish-oriented echolocation than anything else, but we have so few active sensory systems--systems that require you to do something in order to feel them; touch is one of the ones we do have--that there's no obvious parallel anything quite like it for humans. The thing about active sensory systems is that the signal you use to reflect qualities of your environment back to yourself so you can extract information from the environment is also a signal that can encode information about you, so every pulse or click or echolocatory whistle is an imprint of your unique self on the universe around you. This is, of course, an unplumbed trove of contextual communication for social animals that rely heavily on active sensory systems... like bats and toothed whales, and also for understanding interactions of weakly electric fish like knifefish.

I also hate Nagel's What Does It Mean to Be a Bat--its corrections are obvious to me, and I said as much when we had to read it in my grad degree, so I experienced reading it as a tedious, condescending lecture--so it's really amusing to me that Ed Yong also went "Yeah, but---" when he dug into it. I gotta check this book he's got out, even if I suspect it will also make me really homesick.

fuck, I miss acoustics. maybe I'll look more heavily into doing ultrasonic vocalization work with the mice over here.
posted by sciatrix at 10:44 AM on June 10, 2022 [10 favorites]

This is about Nacho, a five-year-old gelding that was being groomed at one of the pack stations in the High Sierras to be a mountain horse. (Mountain horses are the Green Berets of equines.)

During Nacho’s second season in the mountains, he was assigned to be schooled as a saddle horse. The season before, he had been strung between two mules. He carried a light pack and learned to negotiate rocky trails, slick-rock passages, and other valuable skills.

To understand my point, knowing a few things about equines is helpful. Each eye sends two different images to his brain. The upper part of each eye works with the other to give the horse binocular vision. The lower part of each eye is blocked by his nose, sending an independent image of the area around his feet to his horse’s brain. The horse sees three different versions of the world—one version is straight ahead, with both eyes, and I guess it works a bit like our own eyes. The other versions are the images of the ground on either side of his head. The shape of the horse’s face gives him one more additional challenge: a blind spot between his eyes that extends to about six or eight feet directly to his front. As he walks, he moves his head slightly from side to side, so the blind spot doesn’t register to his horsey brain. Maybe you can see where this is going.

A winter storm had dropped several trees across a particular trail. In cases such as this, the Forest Service cuts a ten-foot gap in the trunk, wide enough to accommodate hikers and pack animals. The rest of the tree is left to rot in peace. But the Forest Service had not yet cleared this section of trail, so that day, we had to bust the brush to make our way around the blockage. We spent the night in the client’s camp and returned to the pack station the following day. While we were gone, the Forest Service sent out a crew armed with chain saws and snatch blocks to open the path.

We approached the downed trees. Nacho glanced at the trail we’d broken, but he also saw that the trail was now cleared. He snorted and bobbed his head. His eyes were messing with his brain. By the time we got within ten feet of the downed trees, his world had turned inside out. He looked directly at the trees and could not see the gap. He turned his head slightly; he saw the gap. He knew something wasn’t right, but he hadn’t worked it out. I let him work on it a while, then urged him forward.

He decided to trust me, but only provisionally. He inched his way to the tree and tried to push against it with his chest. The tree magically disappeared. He hopped through the gap, and suddenly, magically, he was past the first tree. He snorted. We repeated this for four more trees. The next time we used this trail, he pranced a bit to show me we were in the realm of the magicians, but he accepted my cues to continue.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: Nacho learned a valuable lesson. Sure, but the lesson he learned was to trust me, not his lying eyes.
posted by mule98J at 11:24 AM on June 10, 2022 [23 favorites]

I put a bird feeder in my back yard three weeks ago. For a week and a half, nothing. Then one chickadee took a gamble, and now there are a couple of dozen chickadees in my backyard along with a bunch of squirrels and even some bluebirds and cardinals acting like they've been stationed in Blood Gulch.

From this, I have concluded two things. First, probably 90% of bird communication is "I found food, got food, follow me to food, there's food", and second, Disney Princesses deal with a lot more bird shit than we've been led to believe.
posted by mhoye at 12:50 PM on June 10, 2022 [3 favorites]

I recently had the pleasure to watch My Life as a Turkey, a PBS/Nature documentary. A man hatches a brood of wild turkeys, and imprints on them to become their mother figure. Several things have stuck with me, but especially these two points (forgive my paraphrasing and possibly mis-remembering of exact details):

--He's lived on this ranch for quite a while, and has seen maybe 4 or 5 rattlesnakes in all that time. But since living 'as a turkey', he's become accepted more as a part of nature. While hanging out with the turkeys, he sees rattlesnakes almost every day; he hangs out in a field with deer who don't run away immediately; etc.

--He talks about living in the moment. Turkeys don't think about the past or the future. They just 'do' and live in the present, so much more so than humans.

This documentary, along with a variety of other animal-related media is really helping to shape my understanding of animals and the world of theirs that we inhabit.
posted by hydra77 at 1:30 PM on June 10, 2022 [5 favorites]

That ending!

As Mustill himself observes, “To be alive and explore nature now is to read by the light of a library as it burns.”

oof.
posted by lalochezia at 2:05 PM on June 10, 2022 [9 favorites]

“It’s a bit harder with cats,” she explained, settling into a chair in my backyard. “Because they’re made entirely out of cat.”

A universal truth.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 4:27 PM on June 10, 2022 [8 favorites]

"If lions could talk, we would still not be able to understand them" -Wittgenstein
posted by StickyCarpet at 4:55 AM on June 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

I put a bird feeder in my back yard three weeks ago.

So, update on this: I moved the bird feeder about six feet this morning and I’ve been watching birds all morning fly up to exactly where the feeder _was_, hover and flap about in confusion for a moment, and then take off. A few then found the new location, and chirped like crazy, and now they seem to have adjusted to the new location.

So, anecdotal, but I suspect that whatever language is in play here is significantly more precise than I had envisioned.
posted by mhoye at 7:30 AM on June 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

The fabulous costumes of (tiny) male Peacock Spiders and choreography of their courtship rituals are fascinating. But even if their audience loves them, the reviews can be brutal.
posted by cenoxo at 10:45 PM on June 12, 2022