The Animal Translator

 

Scientists are using machine learning to eavesdrop on naked mole rats, fruit bats, crows, and whales and to communicate back.

The naked mole rat may not be much to look at, but it has much to say. The wrinkled, whiskered rodents, which live, like many ants do, in large, underground colonies, have an elaborate vocal repertoire. They whistle, trill, and twitter; grunt, hiccup, and hiss.

And when two of the voluble rats meet in the dark tunnel, they exchange a standard salutation. "They'll make a soft chirp, and then a repeating soft chirp", said Alison Barker, a neuroscientist at Max Planck Institute of Brain Research, in Germany. "They have a little conversation". 

Hidden in this everyday exchange is a wealth of social information, Dr. Barker and her colleagues discovered when they used machine-learning algorithms to analyze 36,000 soft chirps recorded in seven mole rat colonies.

Not only did each mole rat have its own vocal signature, but each colony had its own distinct dialect, which was passed down, culturally, over generations.

Full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/30/science/translators-animals-naked-mole-rats.html 

Opinion

Due to how this new talks about a scientific innovation that could change the world in a few years, I would relate it to the Human ingenuity topic.

I decided to write about this article because it seems incredible to me the idea of talking to animals as if they were people. While I was reading the news, I thought that this might just be some sounds that animals make, but it is not at all. Every animal, every colony has a whole language of whistles, grunts, trills, etc...

This opens up infinite possibilities, according to this new, animals could have their own culture. And this leads to innumerable questions: Do they have gods? Do they do math? Could we talk like a whale? Or like a crow?...