Dr Arik Kershenbaum is a zoologist at Cambridge University who specialises in animal communication, studying wolves, gibbons and dolphins to “understand more not just about their ecology and conservation, but also about the evolution of our own language”. His first book, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy, which speculated on alien life, came out in 2020. His new book, Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication, will be published on 25 January.
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’s appealing to everyone: we all want to know whether animals are talking and what they’re saying. Although there’s a weird split personality on this: on the one hand, we want animals to talk; but on the other, we’re scared of animals talking because that would mean we’re not quite as special as we thought.
You’ve trekked to remote Vietnamese jungles and braved harsh winters in Yellowstone to get close to gibbons and wolves. What are the difficulties of observing animal communication in the wild?
Most of these animals don’t really want you around. With wolves it’s extremely difficult because they’re active at night, so you’ve got to use sound. That’s one of the reasons that there’s so much [research] on wolf howls, because most of the time it’s really difficult 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 localisation. We set up lots of recording devices and we triangulate the position of animals using their sounds, which means we don’t need to collar them, or even see them. As long as they’re calling, we know where they are.
I was interested to learn that dolphins have names, or at least signature whistles…
This has been a big focus of research. What are these signature whistles for? How do they arise? We still don’t know all that much. You can identify a wolf from the characteristics of its howl, but that’s not the same thing as being a name, and others will not imitate it. So why do dolphins do it? Almost certainly, it’s got something to do with visibility underwater. Maintaining a cohesive social group when you can’t really see where anyone is means you’ve got 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’re definitely some side branch of the bird evolutionary tree. They specialised in really complex and difficult environments and they have to solve puzzles, such as accessing hard-to-find foods that ripen at unexpected times, in a way that, say, a robin doesn’t. Also they live in social groups. As well as having 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 flocks is one.
Language has been used to set humans apart from other animals: we can speak, they can’t, therefore we’re better. Should we get rid of that idea completely?
There’s no doubt that our behaviour and our ability to manipulate the world are qualitatively different from other animals. And we can say that is because of language. There’s no way we could have created human civilisation without language. So I’m not playing down its importance. I think we are the only species with language on Earth. But I don’t think it’s useful to use that as a distinction. It’s an observation: we have evolved something that other animals haven’t, they’ve evolved things that we haven’t. It would be nice to have wings, but we don’t. I don’t feel bad about that. And I don’t feel bad that animals don’t have language either.
Does it make any sense to ask which animal comes closest to the language ability of humans? Or do various animals come close in different ways?
The latter. One of the key things is there is no sense in which animals are evolving towards having a language. If that were the case, then you could ask: “Who’s gone the furthest along the road to language?” But it’s not. If there were evolutionary drivers for dolphins to have language, they’d have it. But we don’t see them on the cusp. So what that tells us is that in their niche – their environment and the context in which they live – language is not what they need.
It’s only when we bring animals into our domain that certain underlying linguistic abilities can begin to emerge…
That’s most obvious with parrots: they seem to be able to learn actual language, but they certainly don’t use that in the wild. So it is an interesting observation, that whatever our brain has that understands language, their brain isn’t lacking it. But clearly, it’s just not what they need.
Why is it important right now to pay attention to animal communication?
One answer is that AI is becoming a big thing. A lot of people are using AI to try to decode or translate animal language. It’s certainly true that modern AI tools are coming closer to recognising different emotions, different messages, different information. So even if there’s no language, it would be nice to be able to interpret a wolf howl like a wolf interprets a wolf howl. That would be pretty transformational in our relationship with the wild world because we have a lot of conflict with animals. For instance, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to say to wolves: “Go away!” We’ve got a lot of conservation issues, so wouldn’t it be useful to be able to hear a gibbon saying: “Oh, crap, there’s no food here.”
Aside from AI, we are in an environmental crisis point. Increasing awareness of what our fellow creatures on the planet are going through, and how they’re changing, would be helpful. This is a time when we should be paying a lot more attention to what nature is saying, and you can’t do that if you’re just listening for what you want to hear, which is what we’ve been doing until now.
Do you come across accents in any of the animals you work with?
Yes, and they’re interesting in that they demonstrate the way two isolated populations will drift apart genetically, culturally and communicatively. In my paper on hyraxes [herbivorous mammals found in Africa and the Middle East], you saw this really 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 farther you went, the more different they became.
You’re a member of the board of advisers for METI.org (Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence). What are the chances that if we met aliens we’d be able to converse with them?
I’d say extremely high. If we meet aliens, that means they’ve come here and they have some technology that is way beyond us. If I was sent to another planet to converse with intelligent aliens, I would make a very big effort to make sure we’d have some way of communicating.
Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication is published by Penguin (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
