Chimpanzees in the Budongo forest of Uganda have a repertoire of at least 58 gestures, which they combine in sequence much the way we combine words. Will we ever understand what they’re saying?
One evening almost sixty years ago, a Tufts University researcher named Roger Payne was working in his lab when he heard a radio report about a whale that had washed up on a beach nearby. Although it was a cold, wet March night, he decided to drive to the shore. When he arrived, he discovered that the animal had been mutilated. Two passersby had carved their initials in its flanks.
With the help of a machine called a sound spectrograph, Payne converted the voices on the tape into a series of squiggle-like notations. The exercise took years, but eventually it confirmed what he had suspected. The humpbacks always made their wails, squeals, and grunts in a particular order—A, B, C, D, E and never A, B, D, C, E, in Payne’s formulation. The paper in which he announced his discovery appeared inin the summer of 1971.
Imagine the following scene: You are in a room with an owl, a bat, a mouse, a spider, a mosquito, and a rattlesnake. Suddenly, all the lights go off. Instead of pulling out your phone to call an exterminator, you take a moment to ponder the situation. The bat, you realize, is having no trouble navigating, since it relies on echolocation. The owl has such good hearing that it can find the mouse in the dark. So can the rattlesnake, which detects the heat that the rodent is giving off.