A 30 minute lecture and ensuing discussion discussing Ilyena's work around speculating on the dog-to-dog internet and her research on building a dog-to-human video caller. Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas is a Lecturer from The University of Glasgow who researches how to design and build novel systems for animals to access computer systems.

A 30 minute lecture and ensuing discussion concerning the history of comparative psychology and its relationship to the history of art, tracing the development of animal-behavior science over the past century. Presenter Dylan Kerr is a writer, editor, and researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. This presentation is based on his master’s thesis project, advised by Diana Reiss and Joshua Plotnik.

Presenter Natalie Uomini is a cognitive scientist who researches intelligence, the evolution of tool-use, language/communication, and teaching. She studies animals (including humans) by using methods from neuroscience, psychology, anthropology and archaeology. Since 2015 she has worked with California sea otters living wild in the Pacific waters of the USA and travelled to a small South Pacific island to study the behaviour and communication of New Caledonian crows living in the wild. Natalie is in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.

Our second lecture will be given by Ofer Tchernichovski on how balanced imitation sustains song culture in zebra finches. When birds learn songs, they balance their imitation performance in a manner that sustains a rich and stable culture of song repertoires. Did you know that songbirds acquire songs by imitation, as humans do speech? A frequency dependent balanced imitation prevents extinction of rare song elements and the overabundance of common ones, promoting repertoire diversity within groups while constraining drift across groups, which together prevents the collapse of vocal culture into either complete uniformity or chaos.

William Lynn (Bill) kicked off our Interspecies Conversations 2021 Lecture Series. Seeking King Solomon’s ring’ in the interpretation of other animals is a pathbreaking scientific and technical challenge. Alongside those challenges are profound ethical issues and implications that must inform this work from the outset.