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TALKING TO THE ANIMALS

Can we talk to the animals? Some researchers think so. And there is even more evidence that many animals employ impressive language systems of their own!

Gorillas
Koko is a gorilla who learned American Sign Language and taught her human family about gorillas and their feelings. When Francine Patterson, a young graduate student in psychology at Stanford, first saw a tiny, undernourished baby gorilla named Hannabi-Ko at the San Francisco Zoo, she had little reason to think that the sickly ape would become her constant companion – and the subject of the longest continuous experiment ever undertaken to teach language to another species. But within a year, Project Koko was underway, and in two weeks the gorilla was using correct signed gestures for food, drink and more. Today, more than 25 years later, Koko – the world’s most renowned gorilla – has a vocabulary of more than 1,000 words.

playhouse

Prairie Dogs
Prairie dogs have individual calls which scientists consider one of the most complex animal languages ever studied in the wild. When prairie dogs see a person and give the alarm, they are not just crying “Danger!” but might actually be saying “Tall, dark man!” (or something along those lines).

Whales
Humpback whales sing some of the most complex and beautiful songs known. The most basic unit of the song is a single sound or “element.” They may be long groans, low moans, roaring sounds, trills or chirps, and are arranged into simple repeating patterns usually with two to four different sound types. These short strings of sounds are repeated several times and are known as “phrases.”

The song itself is an amazing phenomenon. It is highly structured, and, at any one time, all the males in the population sing the exact same song. Over time, however, the pattern changes, but all the singers make the same changes to their songs! Researchers think that the singing is part of the mating process.

Elephants
Elephants communicate with one another using sound, sight, touch and scent. The noises they make – a repertoire of rumbles, roars, trumpets, bellows, cries, screams, and snorts that spans almost ten octaves including sounds that humans cannot hear – are the most challenging for scientists to comprehend.

William Langbauer of the Pittsburgh Zoo has characterized several specific infrasonic calls based on when they occur and how elephants react to them. When individual family members reunite after being separated, they greet each other enthusiastically; the excitement increases in proportion to the length of the separation. They trumpet, scream and touch each other.

An elephant attempting to locate its family uses the contact call, a relatively quiet low tone with a strong overtone audible to humans. Immediately after contact calling, the elephant will spread its ears and rotate its head as if listening for the response. The contact answer is louder and more abrupt than the greeting call, trailing off at the end. Contact calls and answers may continue for hours until the elephant successfully rejoins its family. At the end of a meal, when it’s time to move on, one member of the family moves to the edge of the group, lifting one leg and flapping its ears. It repeats a “let’s go” rumble which eventually rouses the whole family to action.

Whether it’s the way of Dr. Dolittle, sign language, or animal-whispering, most of us would love to be able to “talk to the animals.” Animals, however, all seem to have their own languages—mysterious languages that we may never fully understand.