THE WEEK IN WILDLIFE 06/15/2024
Horses Return to Their Native Land, and AI as an Animal Interpreter
by Richard Conniff
Bringing Wild Horses Home
I like to start the weekend with good news, and restoring the last wild horses on the planet to their native habitat ranks high on my list. Czech military flights have carried seven Przewalski's horses back to the steppes of Kazhakstan. They have been absent from that central Asian country for centuries. But cultural records of the horse there date back 2000 years before appearance of the domestic horse.
The horses are now at home in 150-acre reintroduction area. After a year getting used to new foods and the fierce Kazhak winter, they’ll go free into a landscape of grasslands and marshes covered 2700 square miles. Another 40 horses will join them over the next few years, sent from captive-breeding programs at zoos in Prague, the Czech Republic, and Munich, Germany. Those programs have previously restored the horses to Mongolia, where the 34 reintroduced individuals have now grown to a population of 850 horses.
Artificial Intelligence As An Animal Interpreter
Wild African elephants call to each other using individual names, and the other party recognizes and responds to that call, according to a study published this week in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Naming in this fashion is a trait previously thought to exist only in humans. Other species, like bottlenose dolphins and orange-fronted parakeets do something less demanding, addressing one another by imitating the sound an individual typically produces to broadcast its identity. But the elephants’ style of naming takes more intelligence than “imitative labeling,” according to the study, “as it requires individuals to make an abstract connection between a sound” and a specific individual.
The researchers used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to pick up the use of names in a sound library of routine vocalizations—contact, greeting, and care-giving rumbles—made by female savanna elephants at Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve and Amboseli National Park. Then they used loudspeakers in the field to re-play the sounds and record which animals responded. The calls an individual made to the same individual receiver sounded the same in repeated instances—and differed significantly from the calls made to other receivers—siblings, say—who had the same relationship with the caller.
This could be just the beginning of artificial intelligence as a tool for interpreting communication in other species. Using an AI model originally trained on human speech, other researchers have recently reported “progress towards dog bark decoding.” So far, the number one dog bark category identified is “very aggressive barking at a stranger” followed closely by “normal barking at a stranger.” But sound libraries also exist for thousands of species of amphibians, fish, mammals, and birds in the wild, and the co-authors suggest that artificial intelligence could begin to make unexpected sense of them.
ANTS & THE ART OF COMMUNICATION
A hundred million years ago, eons before our earliest known primate ancestors came into existence, ants had already developed the tools to be “sophisticated chemical communicators,” according to a study out this week in the journal Science Advances. Researchers at Hokkaido University examined a small group of a now extinct ant species (Gerontoformica gracilis) preserved close together in amber, as if frozen in mid- conversation.
Their microscopic analysis required them to grind and polish the amber surrounding the ants, down to the thickness of a human hair. Then they applied a new rotating laser scanning technique to further reduce the optical aberrations caused by the amber. The new method revealed the details of sensory organs on their antennae called antennal sensilla. These ancient sensilla matched four of the eight sensilla modern ant species depend on to detect pheromones, as the basis for their sophisticated social system.
One such sensilla on the ancient ants, for alarm detection, must have enabled them “to coordinate and mobilize nestmates to great advantage,” for instance, during “attempted predation, and the invasion of territorial space, just like extant social insects.”
The new evidence confirms the hypothesis that early ants that ants “lived in a highly advanced social system even in their early evolutionary stages,” says paleontologist Ryo Hokkaido, lead author of the study.
That’s it for this now. Make time this weekend to get outside and hear the birds singing.