[whale singing] - In 1970, a recording of whales communicating changed the world.

This is a track from the album "Songs of the Humpback Whale" and a lot of people credit it with causing a massive shift in how humans treat whales and other endangered animals.

At the time, commercial whaling was decimating whale populations, but the songs of whales launched a cultural movement.

The album was played in front of Congress as the US federal government moved to ban commercial whaling, and in 1973, the Endangered Species Act was passed.

It was a landmark bill that has saved dozens of species.

Listening to the songs of the whales was a groundbreaking moment in the relationship between humans and the animal world.

But what if we could decode the languages of animals and truly communicate with them?

What if we could listen and talk to animals on a deeper level?

I'm Sinead Bovell and today I wanna take a closer look at the history and future of animal communication.

[upbeat music] "The Songs of the Humpback Whales" is a powerful example but of course it isn't the first instance of communication with animals changing our relationship with the natural world.

As a matter of fact, humans have been communicating with animals for thousands of years, typically through nonverbal means.

There are a lot of theories out there but some researchers think the way wolves were domesticated was through nonverbal communication.

This is very simplified, but essentially some researchers think that humans and wolves were able to understand each other's intentions through subtle physical markers like eye contact, relaxed tails, posture, et cetera.

This allowed them to recognize patterns of behaviors, socialize and bond, and thousands of years later, we have human's best friend.

And of course, today, dogs and humans share a fairly robust form of communication.

But are we truly communicating, or is it just a continuation of recognizing patterns of behavior?

- Since time immemorial, human beings have been observing or you could say studying the world around us.

Though we know so much, very little of animal communication has been analyzed at great detail or at massive scale.

- This is Katie Zacarian, co-founder and CEO of the Earth Species Project, a nonprofit dedicated to decoding non-human language.

And it's not just animals.

There is mounting evidence that trees communicate to their roots and flowers can sense bees and begin to produce nectar to entice them.

We're just scratching the surface and beginning to understand the vast web of communication around us.

The real question is, can we join the conversation?

- I'm Denise Herzing, I'm the Research Director and Founder of the Wild Dolphin Project.

The Wild Dolphin Project is a nonprofit that was formed with the specific goal of observing and understanding wild dolphins, specifically a group in The Bahamas.

- For the last 40 years, she's been studying the same pod of dolphins, and one major area of her research has been the way they communicate.

- Dolphin communication takes a lot of angles.

Dolphins have the basic senses that we do with the exception of smell, so they have pretty good vision in tropical areas, touch is very important to them, they have taste, and of course they're known for their acoustics, so that's their probably most highly developed sense because of the environment they live in.

- Dolphins communicate with a variety of sounds but two primary modes are clicking and whistling.

Here's what a click sounds like.

[dolphin clicking] It's used mostly for orientation and navigation.

Like bats, dolphins are echolocators and researchers think clicks are a major part of that.

And then there are the whistles and they might be the key to unlocking the next step of human-dolphin communication.

Let's listen.

[dolphin whistling] Whistles can do something very important.

They can label, which lets dolphins tell one another what things are and when something happened.

- Well, you know they have the potential to develop these labels that are very specific.

We've had situations out in the wild where we've had events that would lead you to the simplest explanation that they planned something and they communicated that to their buddies.

Now, that's a very big feature of language, right?

That you can communicate something in the past or the future and work with that.

You know, that's time displacement, and that's a huge advantage of language, right?

Instead of just whistling about your food that you're eating, you can talk about what you did during the day, right?

While you're eating.

So, you know, there are indications that there's more going on.

It's just hard to get at, you know, you gotta get the data and you gotta have the observations.

- But there's a new technology that's seemingly everywhere that has the potential to provide the data that could spur a breakthrough, AI.

Yes, we're talking about AI again, and just a quick aside, I know that everyone on the internet, including myself, uses the term AI as a catchall for seemingly everything.

But the Earth Species Project is trying to do something very specific.

- If I were to characterize how the Earth Species Project is using artificial intelligence to decode animal communication, I would keep in mind two things.

One is that the field of artificial intelligence is exploding right now with dozens of new publications released every week, and so we are testing new things all the time.

And then the field of behavioral ecology is also exploding largely due to the emergence of new sensors that are being developed to capture data.

And what artificial intelligence approaches are very strong at is analyzing vast troves of data and discerning patterns from that data, and so we're developing these foundational tools to analyze complex data sets to solve the question of multimodal communication systems.

Multimodal basically is one way of saying that communication is comprised of so many different aspects.

You know, it's acoustic, it's movement, it's even chemical.

- The Earth Species Project has some lofty goals and some even loftier timelines.

They guesstimate that in 12 to 36 months AI should be able to model the pattern that they think exist in whale and crow languages.

Then, using the same pattern models, they think they can imitate whale and bird sounds with incredible accuracy, so accurate that real whales, crows, et cetera, won't be able to tell the difference.

But here's the rub.

AI will decode the patterns and maybe, maybe give us the ability to communicate, but this will happen before we know what we're actually saying.

- In 1991, I started, I thought it'd be really cool to do some playback 'cause we had a catalog of their signature whistles, right?

Which are individual whistles, like their names, basically.

So we had an underwater speaker that went overboard on the boat and we played a signature whistle of a dolphin named Katie, right?

And I'm in the water.

I'm like, okay, Katie hasn't shown up but all her friends have now shown up.

It's like, oh, that's interesting.

So we started playing the signature whistles of her friends that were there.

And there was one dolphin named Stubby, a male, and we played his signature whistle and he didn't want that to happen.

He went over to the speaker and he went like open mouth threat.

He came over to me and he threat, and then he left.

I'm like, okay, we do not know enough about the etiquette of how you use signature whistles, so I never did it again.

I was like, that's it, no more playback.

That's exactly that process of you do not know what you're putting out or the rules about it.

- We'll just be spitting out the same patterns we hear with barely a rough guess on what the patterns can mean.

It won't be like having a device that instantly translates everything.

At best, it will probably feel something more like this.

- The only thing these phrases have in common are five signals.

- I hope somebody's taking all this down.

- What are we saying to each other?

- It seems they're trying to teach us a basic tonal vocabulary.

- It's the first day of school, fellas.

- My question is, will improvements in our ability to understand animals increase our ability to create spaces for them, spaces where they can thrive?

- There's so much more that has yet to be discovered and our capacity to develop approaches to ensuring conservation practices and our economic systems and our political systems take into account the sophisticated cultural considerations is really exciting to me.

But moreover, I think the most extraordinary possibility is that we might catalyze a dramatic shift in how human beings relate to the rest of nature.

It tears us away from the occupations of the human ego and helps us realize the simple truth that we're not at the top of this pyramid and we should not consider ourselves the center of a system that's here for us to exploit and extract from in a unsustainable way.

And this shift in perspective is possibly the most powerful outcome of this, and one that's urgently needed right now as we're facing these massive crises.

- So, maybe in five years we're talking to whales.

In 15 years, I'm talking to Horace.

And in 100 years, we have an understanding of the natural world that's hard to even fathom right now.

But I also wonder, do we have the right to hack into animal languages and eavesdrop on their worlds?

I mean, we humans already have a funny way of changing the course of evolution, and clearly not always for the better.

But if it means I could be a better cat mom to Horace and we could all take better care of this planet and the species we share it with, maybe talking to animals is exactly what we need.

[gentle music] ♪ [gentle music fades out]