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 […]
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 […]
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: […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]