Plupp is the protagonist of a series of children’s books by Swedish author Inga Borg, who first created the character in 1955. Plupp can speak to all animals and we can learn alot from plupp’s love of naturen. Plupp is a small figure with blue hair and a red nose, who lives in a kåta […]
Despite their small brains, ravens and crows may be much smarter than humans. A new study suggests that the size does not matter. It is not the size of the brain, but the the neuronal density and the structure of the birds’ brains that play an important role in terms of their intelligence. A study […]
Chomsky has dismissed efforts to teach apes like Koko how to sign as revealing nothing about the antecedents of human language. But now we know better. According to David Shariatmadari there are several reasons: A team of researchers in Florida recently set out to record the “acoustic behaviour” of bottlenose dolphins while they completed a difficult […]
SIUA is the School of Human-Animal Interaction founded in 1997 in Bologna by Roberto Marchesini and Sabrina Golfetto after many years of research within the field of human-animal relationship. Roberto Marchesini is considered a worldwide leading figure in zooanthropology and in cognitive-relational approach to dog’s pedagogy and psychology. The main aim of Siua is creating […]
Mycorrhizas are fungal associations between plant roots and beneficial fungi. The fungi effectively extend the root area of plants and are extremely important. The more we learn about these underground networks, the more our ideas about plants have to change. They aren’t just sitting there quietly growing. By linking to the fungal network they can help […]
Language is often metaphorical. To understand what another individual means to say it is therefore often necessary to be able to see from another’s perspective. This requires empathy and fantasy. In the wounderful documentary, The Botany of Desire, from 2009, we get a good example of what it may mean to see from the perspective […]
Mort Garson’s Rhapsody in Green is music recorded for plats. By trial and error he learned what they found must stimulating and sexually arousing. Here is a thrilling sample. Mort Garson is well known as one of the pioneers of electronic music in the late ’60s; some may have heard of his contributions to quite a few pop hits […]
What if all living creatures in this universe were communicating with a unknown yet learnable language of signs? This at least is what biosemantics is about – a no longer so new branch of science aimed to explore the language of life itself. This is how the international society for biosemantics studies describes the discipline: […]
Phytosemiotics is the study of the language of non-animal beings. In an excellent article from 2000 professor Kalevi Kull from University of Tartu (Estonia) explains the biosemiotic background of recent developments in the field. Abstract: “Asking, whether plants have semiosis, the article gives a review of the works on phytosemiotics, referring to the tradition in […]
For some of us it comes as no surprise that the forests of this earth are alive and fully communicative. Yet their means of communication are still to complex for us simple humans to understand. Some researchers do however have qualified guesses: Forests are essential ecosystems for life on earth. They cover 30% of the […]
Ian Ingram makes robots that interact with non-human animals. He studies and replicated behavior and communicative patterns. The effects are often stunning. His Danger, Squirrel Nutkin! from 2009 is telling. Here he has made a robot that uses computer vision to scan for squirrel predators such as hawks, foxes, and human beings. When they approach […]
Humanimalia is a top end scientific journal for research on human animal interface. This is how they describe their task: The past twenty-five years have witnessed an extraordinary explosion of interest in human interfaces with non-human animals. Since the publication of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in 1975 and the beginning of the movement for animal […]
Jenny Animal Linguist is a promising scholar in the emerging field of Animal Linguistics. Follow her progress on Twitter, @AnimalLinguist, and support her work – which she herself characterizes in these terms: “It is my goal to bring Animal Communication to the fore as a distinct field of research, and especially within Linguistics – so far, […]
Millions of years before we humans came along, the earth’s oceans were a vast, unbroken web of whale song. The complex courting arias of humpbacks, the distinct clicking dialects of migrating sperm-whale clans, the congalike poundings of Pacific grays, the multi-thousand-mile moans and blips of massive blue and fin whales conversing across oceans at octaves […]
According to swedish Artist Christine Ödlund, when a plant reacts to a butterfly larvae feeding on its leaves, it releases chemical substances, or compounds. In collaboration with the Ecological Chemistry Research Group at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the characteristics of these compounds are here analyzed, transposed into amplitude and intensity of sinus tones and recorded […]
It has long been known that our bodies are really a mishmash of many different organisms. Microbes in your gut can produce neurotransmitters that alter your mood; some scientists have even proposed that the microbes may sway your appetite, so that you crave their favourite food. An infection of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, meanwhile, […]
Many people are irrationally afraid of rodents. But a growing body of evidence shows that mice and rats are a lot more like us than you ever imagined. Did you know that rodents laugh when tickled? It’s true. They can also feel each other’s pain (or at least see it in each other’s faces) and […]
In connecting cosmology statistics research with studies on non-human language Dr. Laurance Doyle shows us a new way both to understand dolphin baby babble and how we can establish criteria for distinguishing intelligent life in space! It begins with one question: Are we Alone? Dr. Laurance answers like this: Well, we share a planet with […]
Lots of people love the birds in their garden, writes Katy Sweall, but it’s rare for that affection to be reciprocated. One young girl in Seattle is luckier than most. She feeds the crows in her garden – and they bring her gifts in return. Eight-year-old Gabi Mann sets a bead storage container on the dining room […]
Pheromones and other kinds of chemical communication underlie the behavior of all animals. When two dogs meet and sniff, they gain a wealth of information from each other’s smells. Each dog will discover the sex, maturity, and hormonal state of the other; some of these smells will be species-wide dog pheromone signals. Each dog also […]
Just like humans, many other animals use different tones of the voice to communicate different intonation and meaning. One telling example is the orangutan. Just as us they use deeper and lighter sounds to share different values of information. But unlike us they often use their hands as a modifier. A team of researchers with affiliations to institutions in Belgium, the U.K. and The Netherlands has […]
Contrary to popular thought, chameleons do not change colors or patterns to blend with their surroundings. Rather, their color change is primarily for intraspecific communication. Most calm, content chameleons display a base color of green, often with other marks to break up their outline. When a chameleon wants to change colors, he redistributes the pigment […]
It is often thought that memory is the key to advanced language and that most non-human species do not have it. It is in this way we speak about the goldfish. But just as the goldfish, most animals have much better memory than humans and thus a better capacity for advanced language. One telling example […]
The poisonous dart frogs use conspicuous color to tell predators that they are not good to eat. Similarly, a venomous coral snake sports rings of bright color to advertise that it isn’t to be messed with—by a bird considering it for lunch, for instance—while a milk snake, which isn’t poisonous and could be taken quite […]
In this story, collected by the Grimm brothers, we learn about an unexpecting king who learns the language of animals. But at what cost? A long time ago there lived a king who was famed for his wisdom through all the land. Nothing was hidden from him, and it seemed as if news of the most […]
Constantine ‘Con’ Slobodchikoff is an animal behaviorist and conservation biologist. He is a professor at Northern Arizona University where he studies referential communication, using prairie dogs (Cynomys gunnisoni) as a model species. Much of his recent research has shown a complex communicative ability of the Gunnison prairie dog alarm calls. In early 2008 he formed the Animal language Institute to create a place where people can […]
Xenolinguistics is the study of the languages of alien species. The nature and form of such languages remains purely speculative because so far no search for extraterrestrial intelligence projects have detected signs of intelligent life beyond Earth. The possibility of future contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life has made the question of the structure and form of potential alien language a topic […]
Chemical signals are the primary language used by ocean organisms, writes Cheryln Dybas at NFS. Using a kind of extra-sensory perception (ESP) of the deep, marine animals and plants react to other species and to their environment based on these cues. Humans are poorly designed to understand such chemically-driven interactions “because we sense the world primarily via visual […]
How does cross-spore germination between two parallel wide-area networks work? How is communication etablished between radio-based technologies and the single organism network of the mycelium? Martin Howse and his project Radio Mycelium: Interspecies Communication has the answer. Fungal transceivers sprouting mycelial antennas form an imaginary underground network. Diversity of human networks is mapped across fungal diversity in the […]
Two types of fish—grouper and coral trout—can use sign language to communicate about their experiences. A study published in Nature Communications discovered that the fish are able to “point” at the phenomena they have in mind. After studying gesturing grouper in the wild, researchers found that when the prey fish escaped the hunting alliance, a […]
The vivid colours of coral reef fishes represent a language that dates back at least 50 million years but is still baffling to humans in many respects, a leading fish expert concedes today. Colour in fish is probably a highly developed form of communication, some of which we can interpret, but much of which remains […]
Fish communicate with sound, movement and electric waves. Their semantic sensory perception is extraordinary and complex. It takes some good amount of imagination to understand it. The lateral line is the main sensory organ of fish. This organ not only captures sounds, it can also sense tremors and currents. This line system, which detects gentle […]
We all live in our own consciousness bubbles. Call them worlds. They may be shared or multiplited. In order to get a glimpse of another individuals point of view one needs to enter that person’s world. The Theriomorphous-Cyborg of artist Simone Ferracina tries to help that process. Simone asks us to enter the world of […]
In a classical article from 1974, the American philosopher Thomas Nagel shows that we need to take consciousness into account if we are to understand the point of view of another species. Nagel argues that that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of thinking that there is something that it is (or feels) […]
Sahamalaza sportive lemurs, an endangered species of Madagascan lemur, use the alarm calls of birds and other lemurs to pick up on the presence of predators, according to researchers, who report the find as a first of its kind to confirm that lemurs can recognize the calls of a non-primate species. There is a dearth […]
In recent article in Science, entitled “The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music“, it is suggested that not only are natural sounds such as whale and bird songs music, but that their songs may be part of a “universal music” that provides an intuitive musical concept to many animals—including humans. Our world is filled […]
Implicit in the relationships between human and other-than-human which characterize animistic cosmologies is the mediation of these relationships through various forms of communication. Theresa Miller (2012) has found that among the Canela of Brazil, all people can speak to plants, but only shamans can understand what the plants say to them. In a recent research […]
The FIDO, or Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations is a device for improving communication between working dogs and the humans they assist, including canines that serve as guide, hearing, service, skilled companion, search and rescue, and police dogs. Incredibly, the FIDO works as a wearable computing device to help assistance dogs communicate more directly […]
Like Takara Tomy’s Bowlingual, the dog “translator” device, the Meowlingual will help you decode what your cat is telling you. It can analyze the expression on your feline friend’s furry face and categorize it into six different moods. The gadget also translates around 200 words in “cat chat”. It can even interpret 21 kinds of […]
Just as the BowLingual (バウリンガル), the No More Woof is a device designed to perceive and translate the thoughts and feelings of your dog. No More Woof aims to develop a small gadget that uses the latest technology in micro computing and EEG to analyse animal thought patterns and spell them out in Human Language* […]
Communication among prairie dogs and other highly social animals is much more sophisticated than we think. Professor Con Slobodchikoff of Northern Arizona University has spent the past 30 years studying a foreign tongue. But there are no instructional podcasts or evening classes to help him: Slobodchikoff is trying to learn prairie dog. Prairie dogs, a […]
Interspecies Communication Inc. administers a research program that gives creative people the opportunity to interact directly with wild animals and habitat through music, art, and ceremony. ICI is a US 501(c)(3) non-profit, founded in 1978 to promote a better understanding of what is, and what can be communicated between human beings and other animals. Their methods focus […]
Lapine, the language of rabbits, is introduced in Richard Adams classic adventure novel Watership Down, published by Rex Collings Ltd of London in 1972. The fragments of language presented by Adams consist of a few dozen distinct words, and are chiefly used for the naming of rabbits, their mythological characters, and objects in their world. […]
Douglas Ramsey is code-named Cypher, after his ability to decipher languages, including animal languages. He was a teenage friend of Kitty Pryde of the X-Men, sharing an interest in computers and video games. Although Ramsey became a friend of the New Mutants, he was unaware that he and they were mutants. However, when the techno-organic […]
Parseltongue, the language of snakes, has associations in the common mind with Dark Magic (although Dumbledore stated that it is not necessarily an evil quality). Those possessing the ability to speak it (“Parselmouths”) occur very rarely. People apparently acquire the skill through learning or via a method of xenoglossia, such as through genetic inheritance (or […]
This low-budget movie about human-animal communication set in the sword-and-sorcery cycle of the early ’80s wasn’t successful during its initial release, but has steadily built a strong cult following over the years. Director: Don Coscarelli Rated: PG Running Time: 1 hr. 58 min. Genre: Action & Adventure, Science Fiction & Fantasy Theater Release: Aug 20, 1982 […]
BowLingual (バウリンガル), or “Bow-Lingual” as the North American version is spelled, is a computer-based dog-to-human language translation device developed by Japanese toy company Takara and first sold in Japan in 2002. Versions for South Korea and the United States were launched in 2003. The device was named by Time magazine as a “Best Invention of […]
Lucky People Center – Interspecies Communication Label: Beverage Records – 527 682-2 Format: CD, Album Country: Sweden Released: 1995 Genre: Electronic Style: Techno, Experimental, Ambient Tracklist 1. Interspecies Communication Performer – Österberg*, Huhta*, Söderberg*, Skander ChandWritten-By, Producer – LPC*, Skander Chand 2:35 2. It’s Good For You 5:40 3. On And On 4:47 4. To The Space 8:10 5. Death Machine […]
“For centuries humans have tried to teach animals to communicate like humans,” said Michael Darre, an animal science professor at the University of Connecticut (UConn) in Storrs. “And now we’re getting to the point where we’re saying, Wait a second. Why don’t we learn their language instead of making them learn ours?” Researchers from several […]
There are many examples of animals that have been forced to adapt to human forms of communication. Often this is called “intelligent” behavior. Clearly there is something deeply problematic with the idea that intelligence can be measured by simililarity to human forms of thought and communication. Here are nevertheless a few interesting examples from a […]
A becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari claim, always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity. We sorcerers have always known that. It may very well be that other agencies, moreover very different from one another, have a different appraisal of the animal. One may retain or extract from the animal […]
Waggle dance is a term used in beekeeping and ethology for a particular figure-eight dance of the honey bee. By performing this dance, successful foragers can share, with other members of the colony, information about the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations […]
Software has performed the first real-time translation of a dolphin whistle – and better data tools are giving fresh insights into primate communication too It was late August 2013 and Denise Herzing was swimming in the Caribbean. The dolphin pod she had been tracking for the past 25 years was playing around her boat. Suddenly, […]
The totemic image for the future is the octopus. This is because the squids and octopi have perfected a form of communication that is both psychedelic and telepathic; a model for the human communications of the future. Cuttlefish, like squid, octopuses and nautiluses, are marine animals belonging to the Cephalopoda class. Studies indicate that cuttlefish […]
Doctor John Dolittle is the central character of a series of children’s books by Hugh Lofting starting with the 1920 The Story of Doctor Dolittle. He is a doctor who shuns human patients in favour of animals, with whom he can speak in their own languages. He later becomes a naturalist, using his abilities to […]
Human and animal communication creates a valuable bridge between human and non-human animals. By connecting with our intuition, we can engage in meaningful dialogue and remember how to hear the subtle messages from those whose space we share in our lives and our natural environment. Coming from a place of respect and reverence for all […]
In Greek mythology, Melampus (Μελάμπους), or Blackfoot, was the introducer of the worship of Dionysus, according to Herodotus, who asserted that his powers as a seer were derived from the Egyptians and that he could understand the language of animals. Part of the story of his abilities goes like this: When Melampus lived with Neleus, […]