Transcript 3 | Conversations with Crows with Natalie Uomini
Diana Reiss
Welcome everybody to our Conversations meeting today. We have a wonderful audience. I'm so glad to see all of you with us today. But we have a wonderful speaker and I think that brought so many of you here. So it's an absolute pleasure for me to introduce our Internet Conversations speaker today, Dr. Natalie Uomini. And Natalie and I first met. I should say I was delighted to first meet Natalie at a Templeton Foundation meeting. I guess it was about two years ago, and I think we immediately bonded. I've just been fascinated with her work. Natalie is a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. She received her BA in Cognitive Science and linguistics at the University of California in San Diego. She then did two master's degrees, one in linguistics and teaching French as a foreign language at the University of Grenoble. She did her second MA in Biological Anthropology at Durham University and then completed her PhD in Evolutionary Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Southampton in the UK. So with this very interdisciplinary and unique combination of talents and expertise, Natalie now integrates and uses this interdisciplinary expertise to investigate the continuities in evolution, in the evolution of cognition across species, including us human species. And she has a specific focus on tool use, intelligence and communication. Natalie, we are so thrilled to have you with us here today and to hear about your research and I'll just turn it right over to you.
Oh, and by the way, Natalie has been working with us as a member of our ethics working group with the Interspecies Internet. So I just want to say thank you, Natalie, for being such a great member of our group too. You brought so much to the Interspecies Internet already. So I'll turn it over to you now. Thanks.
Natalie Uomini
Thank you so much. Thank you, Diana. I'll just start my screen sharing here and put it into presenter mode. So I hope that's all right now. And I just need to hide the controls there, so I hope everyone can see my screen. So thanks, Diana, for this wonderful introduction. My name is Natalie Uomini. And you? Yeah, as Diana mentioned, we connected through the Interspecies Internet and so here I am. I'm really delighted actually, to be here. Before I start my talk, I'd like to acknowledge the sponsors who've supported the research that I'll be presenting today. So the Templeton World Charity Foundation, the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have been supporting this work.
I myself, I'm really delighted to be here in front of all of you. It's A real pleasure to be with like minded people who really believe in interspecies communication. And this is going to be the focus of my talk today, in particular with crows. But I'd like to start just with a brief background to myself. I'm sitting actually at the intersection of multiple disciplines, and as Diana so kindly mentioned, I have degrees in cognitive science in linguistics, anthropology and archaeology. And as a postdoc I've been working in neuroscience and animal behavior. And the different research topics that I've been pursuing in my academic career have been at the intersections to where these disciplines meet. So, for example, animal minds, language, animal communication, language evolution, cognitive evolution, origins of language, and toolmaking. The line of research that I've been following for the last 10, 15 years is about language and tools in particular, as these were first thought to be features that make humans special. And in fact, as we know, other animals also do make tools, possibly also have language. And my interest is in finding out what are the types of intelligence that underlie these linguistics and technological skills. And in fact, I think that we are actually not so special as we used to think. So in my talk today, it's about conversations with crows. First, I'll briefly define what I mean by conversation in this talk, and then I'll share with you what we know about New Caledonian crows, and I'll share some of the research that I have been doing that's not yet published about their communication. Finally, I'd like to give you some of my thoughts about interspecies communication, what forms it could take, and what are the kinds of things that I think need to be in place before it can actually happen.
Conversation is defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary as a talk between two or more people in which thoughts, feelings and ideas are expressed, questions are asked and answered, or news and information is exchanged. I'll skip the question of whether animals, nonhuman animals, can be considered people. In this case, we're talking about individuals. But the point here is that it's about an exchange of thoughts, feelings, ideas, questions, news or information. This is the core of what kinds of things are being exchanged between two individuals. When we look at the kingdom of life, the animal kingdom and even the plants, we could ask, well, do these individuals exchange thoughts, feelings, ideas, questions, news or information? And in fact, I think all biologists would say that yes, practically every life form on the planet does exchange at least one of these things. And so in fact, you know, here we have conversations going on on planet Earth in many different forms around us. So this is really the basic definition that I'm talking about today.
So when you look at the sort of tree of life we see, you know, we here, humans, we are up here, our species is about 10 million years old.
The primate clade that we belong to is 75,4 million years old. And this split here between the branch that led to humans and the branch that leads to the, led to reptiles and birds is about 310 million years old. And when we go back up this Sauropsids is this reptiles branch, the bird glade is 150 million years old. And right at the top there we have New Caledonian crows and they're about 5 million years old. In fact, New Caledonian crows and humans share some really interesting features. This is quite remarkable because we consider that there are 310 million years of evolution, in fact, that's 600 million years of evolution in total. That separates us. This is what makes New Caledonian crows a particularly interesting species. To help us understand the different evolutionary features that could have led on these separate lines, could have led to shared traits, today.
I'd like to introduce this wonderful and fascinating species to you. I've been very fortunate to do field work in New Caledonia with these birds. I think most of you in the audience live in a western country if I'm not mistaken. So you probably have seen crows in, whether you're in North America or Europe. The crows that you know, that we know here in Europe or the Americas are about twice the size of these, the ones that you're seeing in the picture here. So they are small sized crowd, a crow, but they're very large brained, so they're quite fascinating. And they're mostly well known for their ability to make tools and use tools. They also learn. So if you look at the individual here in the middle, that's a juvenile, it has two parents, so the pink mouth is the juvenile. And it's just about to start using a tool that one of its parents has left. And they are very sort of very good social learners. They learn these tool making skills from the adults around them. And just like us, they really need a lot of parenting, they need extended parenting to learn these skills. The species itself has particular features, as I mentioned, that are shared with humans. Gavin Hunt and I, in our 2016 paper, we argued that they're actually very similar in many ways. They have a dedicated anatomy for tool use, similar to us. They have a very special shape of their beak and they also have binocular vision. They also have the largest relative brain size of corvid. That's the brain size compared to their body size in humans. Also, we have the largest relative brain size in our clade. They do very fine manipulations with their bill or beak. And this is similar to the way we can use our hands to do very fine things. They also have strong laterality or beakedness, similar to our handedness. And they have these extended childhoods. They're cared for by their parents for two years or more. And this is quite unusual. They do use tools to hunt animal prey, just as our ancestors did, and they're vocal learners. So, in fact, a lot has been already written about their tool making and tool usability, but we really don't know much about their vocal ability. What's so strange about this? Well, vocal learning, for a start, is pretty unusual in the animal kingdom. There are a few species here and there who have this ability to really imitate any kind of sound that they hear. In fact, just like humans, they really need to get the input. So they're not born with a repertoire of sounds. They have to get the input from the social group that they grow up with, the same way that humans need to be growing up in a place to learn that language.
So my focus today, really in this conversations series is going to be about vocal communication. I'm not going to talk at all about body language or visual communication, although that is a complete. Another field that would be another talk. I'll give you an example here. So this is actually a crow that I met. He grew up with a family. He was rescued as a baby from the nest. So he never got the input from wild crows. And he imitates all kinds of sounds. He pretends to laugh. Yeah, it's funny. Isn't it funny how he doesn't open his mouth when he does that. Barks like a dog. He makes car engine standards, imitates a man's voice, imitates.
So it's sort of, you know, this crow. So it's a completely tame crow. It's living freely with a family, and it's about 20 years old now. So it has been around humans for a long time. However, I stood in front of this crow and recorded its sounds. I did not feel like I was having a conversation with it, was simply pouring out the sounds that it had learned to make.
What I realized then was that to really understand how these crows communicate, I would need to study wild crows living in the forest, in their natural groups, in their natural habitat. So that's just what I set out to do. So now, when we work with human participants in a research we do this IRB process, we do informed consent, and this is basically a procedure to make sure that our participants are voluntarily taking part in our study and make sure they have the necessary information that they can understand the risks and, and that the key point is they're free to choose whether or not to participate in our study. I must say I'm not trained as a biologist, so I have not been taught the way that biologists do research. And so I'm coming at things kind of in my own way. And I really believe that when working with animals, nonhuman animals, I believe that we should apply the same standards of respect as when we work with humans. And so I try to make informed consent with birds. So how is this actually possible?
Well, here's what I do. So first of all, we measured, the first time we arrived there, we measured the flight distant minimum flight distance, which is a measure that bird experts use. You walk towards the bird and then you see at which point they fly away. And then you measure that distance and you find out at what distance they feel comfortable with your presence. We measured this at about 25 meters. Then we had a protocol in the field that we would always stay 30 meters away from the birds. We never approached them unless they willingly approach themselves. Here we just set up an apparatus, an experiment, and then we, I don't know if you can see at the far top right of this photo here, the researchers, we sit in chairs and we watch. And the birds are free flying, they roam around the forest. If they want to come to our experiment, they can. And the beauty of this setup is that we know that every single time a bird comes to our experiment, we know that they're always motivated, they're always coming because they want to come. In fact, I've combined these field experiments with systematic observations of these wild birds. And this allows us to keep a rigorous control of variables and a high ecological validity. I've set up cameras and microphones in the trees and we filmed and audio recorded these wild crows in their natural habitat. It really is, in fact, the approach that I'm taking is a complementary to the data that's obtained with different types of experiments. Some other researchers like to capture their study animals. Sometimes they handle them, do some manipulations or treat them with some treatments. And what I'm doing is a complement to that. So I'm really only focusing on the free animal. I don't manipulate them, I don't touch them or approach them. And I gain the information, really valuable information about really what they're doing in their natural Life and in their free habitat. So this is what field work looks like on a small South Pacific island we've set up here. We have fixed cameras, so we have places where we sit and keep cameras, and we also walk around the forest and try to follow the birds as much as possible, as well as setting up automatic cameras on the ground and also in the trees. So I had the great pleasure of climbing some tall trees to set up large audio recorders and video cameras. So what we could do with all this data, then, basically, we have so much data that our analyses are still ongoing, but we've already broken new ground here. And some of the main points are that I already have the largest collection of video and audio of New Caledonian crows, and I'm working now on how to make this accessible for open science because it's pretty unwieldy. We also have the first observations of some previously undocumented events in the species, such as hunting particular types of prey that haven't been seen before, territory defense, dealing with injuries, and certain courtship behaviors. What my colleagues and I published in our 2020 paper is that this extended parenting period gives juveniles a safe haven where they can practice the vital skills that both support and enable their large brains to grow. So this has to do with tool making and tool use, as well as communication. So we really want to talk about communication here. So I've brought you some examples from our field work. The first one here is an example of the sum of the soft calls they make. So you might want to turn up the volume on your computer just for this one.
As you can see, they don't always open their beak fully, so they can make a wide variety of sounds, even with a closed mouth. We also have some calls that are quite loud, so if it's too loud, you might want to turn down the volume. I think we tested the volume. It should be okay. These are calls that they make, we think, to keep track of each other through the day.
This last sound that you saw at the very end here was begging. And in fact, that's what they do when they're asking for food. So this one, I think the other individual was coming with some food, and so that's what was happening here. We also have very interesting call exchanges. So in terms of conversational ability, we do see very often that they, especially in the evening before, as dusk is falling, they start to regroup. They actually have a fish infusion type of social system where they will gather briefly in groups, and then they basically spend most of the day individually or in pairs, and they'll then in the evening gather again before they roost together. And here we had a very interesting call exchange. You'll see me pointing with my finger on the camera the direction of the two individuals who are exchanging calls.
So they're exchanging single calls here. And once we zoomed in on the individual on the right who was calling, we could see that they were basically picking up some last few bites to eat before bed. They exchanged a few calls and then in the end they just fast forward it because it's a bit jumpy. So in the end, after this exchange of single calls, then the one individual flew and joined the other one. And this is what we see very often. So we do see these kinds of call exchanges during the day as well, when they've split up, and then we see that they often start to exchange and these exchanges always end with one of the individuals joining the other. So this makes us quite fairly confident that these are contact calls, which are similar to the ones that are used by some kinds of primates and many other species.
This final video clip here is an example of a family group. So the two on the left are juveniles, and the two on the right are two adults, probably their parents. You can see the juvenile in the middle here begging quite a lot. The adults on the right are using tools to probe into this dead wood and get some beetle larvae. And the two juveniles, one of them is begging, the other is sort of probing with its. But not using a tool yet. You'll see the adult just extract one grub there. At the moment, I think it's not going to feed it to the juvenile. So the juveniles do beg a lot, but they don't always get fed. So this is another point about the extended parenting that's so fascinating, that although the parents really do tolerate these youngsters following them around and they don't always feed them. So these kinds of sort of different vocal calls that we observe. The first thing we did with our data was try and create our first taxonomy or classification of the different call types. So we define a call as the sound that the bird makes in one breath. And usually if the call is. If the different sounds are separated by a gap of more than one second, then we say it's a different type of different call. And so we made here really a descriptive classification, because we don't want to or we cannot really impose meanings yet on these calls. So for the moment, we start with this simple classification by the number of syllables that's in one of the calls, so single, double, triple, quadruple, or five or more. And then there are these begging sounds that they make when they want to be fed. They're quite distinctive. And there are a couple of other unusual and rare sounds that we hear which we haven't quite been able to classify too well. But what we sort of the different context or meanings that we can see in from these examples is first of all, in an alarm situation, whether there's been a predator or a new person coming into the forest, that's an unknown person or a predator. These contact calls that I mentioned, that they keep track of each other through the day when they're visually separated. They also have possibly a call that they use to identify a certain type of new food source. Often this is also called in a group when they gather together. Then the softer calls, we're not quite sure, but they do seem to be not directed at other individuals. And they're so soft that really they can't be heard very far away. So we think they might be something like comforting or something else. So this still remains to be seen. But if you're interested to see some more examples of these calls, I've put a few videos on YouTube. You can search under Dr. Nat's research videos or just email me. I'll be glad to send you some links.
The second thing we did with our data was to use machine learning to identify the individual crows. This work was done by my project collaborators, Patrick and Cassie of Indiana University. What they did was really train this computer to identify first of all crow sounds from all the background noise in the forest. And the second step is going to be to identify individual crows, basically using their voice signature, their individual voice signature, because we know they most likely have. Because other crow species do have individual, individually identifiable voices, dolphins, for example. It's very highly likely that these crows also use the voice to identify each other. So this is ongoing work. We have so much, so much data that we're really. It takes a long time to prepare it for machine learning. So that's where we are now. But the results have been pretty exciting so far. But there are a few things that we do need in order to really, really get a handle on what these crows are saying to each other. Because they are. They're moving around the forest all day long. As I mentioned, they tend to have efficient fusion social system. So they really, you know, they're moving between groups or they're moving around different locations on the forest. And in particular, it would be fantastic to be able to track them with GPS so that we can really see how the individuals are interacting with different groups or different like, subgroups, I suppose, and how they move around and how they use the space. Because it isn't clear yet whether each family has its own small territory or whether they share. Because we do see, for example, at different seasons, different size groups. So there's some really tantalizing glimpses here that we can't quite figure out just from the facilities that we have. If we could really get GPS tags on every individual, then we'd have a really great tracking ability to follow their movements. Secondly, we really do need some long term following. We need to really send researchers out, just like Jane Goodall, following these codes for months and months and months and years on end to be able to get to know the individuals. And it's going to be really essential to learn in what situations the calls are used to start to understand the meanings of these different calls. We need to be able to document all the different contexts and situations. And some of the calls are so rare, we only have like two or three examples of them so far. So these ones especially, you would need more time to be able to collect more examples of those. And thirdly, we need more field sites because we know that there's cultural variation in the tools that these crows make and probably also in their vocal communication. So we could probably talk about dialects and this would be really fantastic if we could have researchers at different locations around the island of New Caledonia and comparing those different groups and different dialects. So those are some of the things that will really help us to get to know, to be able to really listen in more on these conversations.
So I want to sort of spend the last few minutes here sharing some of my thoughts about interspecies communication. And it's, it's like, you know, what are the things that I think need to be in place if we want to achieve this? In fact, I think there are five main prerequisites.
So I think sort of, for example, the first sort of first prerequisite would be that two individuals of different species, they would have to have a shared understanding or at the very least a shared goal. There needs to be something they're aiming for and they need to have similar thought processes. So, for example, if we talk about exchanging the original definition of a conversation, exchanging information or even emotions, well, those individuals would need to be aware of their own emotions in order to exchange them. There needs to be something at least similar goals or similar thought processes.
Secondly, I think there needs to be a desire to communicate. For example, they need to want to engage with that other individual or that other species. So think of a snail, for example. Like, if we could talk to a snail, really, what would we want to say to it? What would the snail want to say to us? I mean, do we honestly really think there's anything we could talk, talk to a snail about? So I think we have to really consider then, you know, what would be the need for communication or what would they to get out of it.
They also need to have compatible sensory systems. So when you think about all the different modes of communication by scent or by hearing, by vision, by chemical signals, there's all sorts on all sorts, and they're not necessarily compatible. And this is key for both the outgoing message and the incoming message. We need to be able to produce signals that the other can perceive, and we have to be able to perceive those signals. So a squid and a bee, I mean, they would, they would really struggle to find some common ground in terms of their sensory systems here.
Fourth, I think when we think about conversation, there has to be turn-taking, there has to be active listening, I think, and active signaling. It cannot work if the two individuals are talking over each other. This is not just mutual eavesdropping, for example. I think there has to be really an active ability to both listen and signal to the other.
The fifth point I think is that the individuals need to have matching type of intelligence. For example, wolves and orangutans, they both have a very high social intelligence. So this could give them a level on which to start to communicate. I think these, these five points are probably, I'm sure, not the only ones, but I, to me, these are sort of the, the core ones. And when we think about what already exists in the world, I mean, there are examples of interspecies communication. The honey guide is one of the fascinating ones. Birds are helping humans how to find beehives. And this is known from Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya and several other African countries. These bird and human, they exchange sounds and whistles and they monitor each other's movements towards the beehive. So the bird leads the human to the beehive. The human chops down the tree, gets the beehive, and they leave some wax for the birds, which the birds really love. Here they have a shared goal. The shared goal is to get honey, is to find the beehive. They have a sensory system, the sense of hearing that they can use to create signals and perceive each other's signals. And they have a reason to communicate. And there are other examples. There were dolphins and fishermen in Brazil who help each other to find fish in the ocean. So there are a few, few of these examples out there. But I wanted to do a thought experiment and really go into what kind of conversation would you have with a New Caledonian crowd based on what we know of their behavior in the wild? Well, we could, for example, they could request food from us. They already do that with each other. They beg to each other. And in fact, I had one experience in my last field season where one of the juveniles came to me and begged at me just as I was refilling the meat that we give them. And so I think they can see us as a food provider. We could also imagine that we could show them a food source. Perhaps we could signal to them that we are bringing food in some way. I think they would have this shared goal of obtaining food. We could perhaps also share each other's location. So this seems to be something they do with, with themselves, with each other through the day, keeping track and asking each other where they're located. Identification could also be another point. And in fact, we guess that they can identify each other because they do often send calls and a certain direction. When they have heard a certain individual calling, they'll orient their body and call back in that direction. Even though there might be other individuals in another direction. It could be useful also for us to identify ourselves as friends and so they can keep track of who's there and to not know who's dangerous or who might be a friend. And perhaps also we could warn them of danger. So they do have their own warning signs. They have seven different birds of prey on New Caledonia, and they do signal with certain calls when those are seen. But I don't know if we could actually help them with that. It might be difficult to get them to understand, but perhaps we could really try some playback experience experiments where we play those different warning signals and see if they behave appropriately. These are all the points I could come up with in my thought experiment about what could a conversation with a crow look like? And it seems like the sort of points are quite limited. So when we think about what they communicate to each other, this is only what we know they might be communicating all sorts of other things that we haven't got yet. So this is also why we need more research. But in fact, the points that we as humans might have in common with them seem to be rather limited, but still tractable. I still think this is tractable.
To sum up here, this final slide here is sort of my conclusion. So I think, first of all, we have to recognize that interspecies communication already exists. It is rare in time and space, but there are cases, active cases, and I think we really need to study them well to understand exactly what makes them successful, or what makes them disappear. New Caledonian crows, I think, are excellent candidates due to those many shared traits they have with humans, such as vocal learning and technical intelligence. I think these shared traits give us many points of contact where we could potentially have shared goals or shared signals. But we do need much more targeted research on this species in particular in their communication. Not only vocal communication, but also physical, visual, and bodily communication. For example, they also can raise their feathers in certain ways. We know that ravens, American ravens, they use lifting of feathers in different body parts as types of signals. There's potentially a huge range of different signals they can produce with sound and vision. I think the main core here is that we need to carefully consider the prerequisites to help us really focus our efforts on the most likely species for interspecies communication. That we really need to not just try to create something that's universal, but rather to focus there on the pairs of species that will be most likely to have those shared goals and shared sensory systems that I think is going to be the way forward for interspecies communication. So thanks again and thank you all for your interest.
Diana Reiss
Thank you so much, Natalie, for such a wonderful talk. So I think we should open the floor right now for questions. And I'm. I'm again, there was a lot to digest there, and I. We had a few questions early on. Let me. I'll just read off. Let me just get to the list.
Natalie Uomini
I'll unshare my screen now.
Will Davis
I think Vince has a question. Diana.
Diana Reiss
Yes. Okay. I was just looking earlier, but Vint, go ahead. Floor is.
Vint Cerf
You should feel free to prosecute a lot of the questions that popped up. This is a fascinating talk, and so thank you for taking the time to share all this with us. I never did know anything about Caledonian crows, although we have some big fat crows here that appear to be absolutely fearless. You know, they basically are fighting with the squirrels over the food that we leave for both of them. So one question is whether you observed cooperation between the crows, and if so, what kind of cooperation have you encountered? What were they trying to accomplish? And was there any audible indication of what was going on?
Natalie Uomini
Yes, that's a great question. We did see some cases of territory defense where it seemed like this one couple who was starting to create their nest to build their nesting site, then proceeded to chase out all the crows who entered their small patch of wood. So they do fly. They chase lots of calling in all directions. So that'll take us a little bit of decoding to really. Once we have the machine learning set up to identify the individuals in all those overlapping calls, we'll be able to start to decode that. But they do certainly cooperate also in nesting. They cooperate in hunting. We've seen them hunting a small rat together and other types of. Especially interacting against other groups.
Vint Cerf
I'm sorry, Diana, just one other thing.
Diana Reiss
Go ahead.
Vint Cerf
I just want to emphasize for everybody else on the call that one of the most valuable things that Natalie has offered in this presentation is information about stuff she wishes she could do if she had the right equipment. Because people like Neil Gershenfeld and I are not biologists or anything, but we like to build stuff. And so if we could figure out how to be helpful, that's something we would enjoy. And so for all of you, if you're thinking about infrastructure, measurement, observation, data capture, those are things that help us a lot in thinking about what we could do as part of the Interspecies Internet effort.
Diana Reiss
Yeah, Vin, thank you for bringing that up because that's so critical. I mean, that's one of the goals, is to bring this forum together and really come up with. With help and finding ways to go to these next steps. So again, we sort of welcome others to join in on that as well.
Natalie Uomini
I think it's a. It's a valuable conversation to have because we as scientists don't necessarily know what, what's out there or what's even possible. So that's why it's really useful to just talk to you guys, to even know what, what you can do and what can be done.
Diana Reiss
There were some early questions, and then I'm looking, taking notes of hands that are up. I'm trying to get.
Natalie Uomini
Working my way through the chat. I think the first question here was about the. One of the videos I showed. Did the adult just poke the juvenile to get its attention? Well, it was a very funny situation. I don't actually know why it was poking, but it was. Yeah, I've never seen that before, actually. So that's the. Yes. Unknown, unknown reason. But yeah, possibly it was just teasing. Who knows? Do they have a sense of humor? We don't know.
Diana Reiss
Thomas Green had a really early question. He was, Thomas, do you want to come on and ask it yourself or do you want me to say It. Thomas, are you there? You want to unmute? Well, I'll ask the question for you then. It says, is there much data for the crows, that the crows map the volume and shape of the sounds with their relative locations of the conversational pros, the conversant crows.
Natalie Uomini
Yeah, I think we. So we can do. We have. With our audio recorders, we actually can triangulate. So we set up six different audio recorders that are synchronized, and we. We are able to pinpoint their location based on how the, you know, the volume at which the calls reaches each of the recorders. So we'll be also working on that to track them, some of the movements of those crows. That's a great question. Thanks.
Diana Reiss
Con, you have your hand up?
Natalie Uomini
Yes.
Con Slobodchikoff
Could you comment on the relative proportion. Of visual signals versus acoustic signals? And does it look like they're redundant in terms of having the same message, or are there different messages carried on visual channels versus acoustic channels?
Natalie Uomini
Yeah, I'd really love to be able to answer this question. That. That's one of the things that's going to need a whole other grant. We really don't know anything about their visual communication. We do know a lot about American ravens and American crows, but New Caledonian crows, no one's ever studied their visual communication. And there's only been one study on their vocal communication so far. So we. Yes, I think that would be one of the first questions. Whether there is redundancy, we don't know. And so far we have not had enough data simply to be able to start to even look at their visual signals.
Diana Reiss
Thank you, Claire Hughes. Claire, you had your hand up.
Will Davis
I think Mason had a question.
Claire Hughes
Oh, I'm sorry. No, I meant to say.
Diana Reiss
Oh, sorry, Claire, I think you had your hand up next. And then Mason, I meant to simply send applause. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay, sorry. Mason, you had a question.
Mason
I'm fascinated by so much of this. Let me just pick on one point in particular I think is kind of interesting is the way that the long juvenile period, the parents are. Well, the children are learning from the parents. I'm wanting to figure out other parents trying to teach the children or other parents just doing stuff that the children imitate. This seems to be one of the interesting facets of the people used to separate out human communication from many other animal forms of communication. Experiments with the puzzle boxes, for example, you have an opaque puzzle box. Turn here, twist here, tap here, get a treat out. They show that to the chimpanzees and the chimpanzees will imitate you make the box transparent. And the chimpanzees will realize two of those steps are redundant. Just go for the tap here. It'll get the treat out. Human children keep doing the unnecessary steps even when the box is transparent. Because there's somehow the trust of the adults are teaching me something that's important for me to learn. That sort of trust, shared goals. Actively trying to teach the children is supposedly the thing that distinguishes humans from other animals. It always struck me that a long juvenile period studying parents, teaching children, as opposed to interspecies imitating, twisting boxes and so on, would be a really interesting place to look at. You got a lot of data here. I'm wondering if you've seen or have any data that might indicate parents actively trying to teach the children. I noticed one point in the chat, somebody asked about cooperative work, which seems to be the sort of. I'm trying to get you to learn this, listen up, idiot child, come pay attention over here. Kind of gestures and things by the adults sort of trying to get the kids to work, like prodding the kid. Pay attention here. That might have been happening in one of those videos. Do you see much evidence of that sort of actively trying to teach.
Natalie Uomini
Thank you for. Thank you for this question. Because actually, the research that I. So the funded project that I've just finished collecting data for was about teaching. So it was not primarily about communication. So my whole aim was here, looking at the interaction between adults and juveniles around these skills. And in fact, we do find that there are certain aspects that we could call teaching. So the adults, for example, they're very tolerant to the juveniles. The juveniles are often like, put their face right into the adult's face. Sometimes the head is touching. They'll be really right there in their face. And the adults are super tolerant. And they seem to be really allowing these juveniles to actively promote their own learning. They also do, for example, leaving their tools, as I showed in one of the video. We don't know if that's intentional or accidental. But in any case, they do it frequently and sometimes, especially when the juveniles are nearby. Then there are also some examples where we've really seen the juvenile start to make a tool. And then the adult will take the tool, do something to it, and then give it back. So in fact, there's some really. We have a few because we haven't been able to spend long time in the field with the projects we've done. But it's been, I think, a total about six months over three field trips. And we have seen few tantalizing cases of these, what you might call teaching events. But it's really fascinating and I think with more field work and more time, we could certainly get a good handle on that. But I think, you know, in terms of the ability to teach, I think it, the potential could be there because they certainly they do have super large brains for their body size. So they are potentially one of the most intelligent corvid species. And I think they have this high social tolerance which really gives them motivation really to, you know, to support the juveniles in their learning process.
Mason
Just as a very quick follow up, I'd love to figure out a way to do some interspecies teaching. Look, I can show you how to get some food if you just make it all like this, refine it all together or something like that. It seems the opportunities for interspecies communication around. I'm trying to, trying to learn from or teach a different species how to get some food they don't currently know how to access.
Diana Reiss
Jonas, I think you've had your hand up for a while.
Jonas
Yeah, thanks. First of all, Natalie, thank you very much for your presentation. And I have a quick question, maybe quick. We see shortly, how is your approach to decoding in sense of meaning? So you want to know what the calls mean. And to explain further, I saw you had a connection to Leipzig, to Max Planck Institute where Tomasello, Michael Tomasello did a lot of research. And I'm asking because you as an interpreter of the calls need to have a common understanding to decode what the calls could probably mean. And this is why I'm asking from a Michael Tomasello perspective kind of common ground thing, how was your approach to decoding.
Natalie Uomini
Thanks for this question. No, it's one of the cores of what has to be done, I think to start to decode those signals. So what the primatologists have been doing, it's been quite effective, I think. So they really. It's all about data. So they just collect a lot of video examples of calling and situations. And then you purely by the correlation… So when there's a call that happens in a certain situation, you can then correlate, you know, start to correlate those together. So it really depends on having enough data to be able to start to see the patterns in the data. So it really is. That's the one, that's the first step. And the second step is then you start to build a hypothesis of, okay, this call is only given in this situation. So we think it might mean this. And then you, you do playback experiments. So that's the second step where you do these really careful playback experiments where you try not to scare them or you know, try not to traumatize them. But you do some very clever, you have to cleverly design the playback experiments that you really then see their reaction and see if the reaction is what you've expected. And so it is a multistage, but the first step really is just collecting enough data to start to even gather the samples of the different calls that you find.
Jonas
You know, I think.
Diana Reiss
Go ahead, Jonas.
Jonas
Now if I might have a follow up on this one, because statistics aside, but don't you have a kind of intuition about meanings because you, you've spent quite a time with those, with that species?
Natalie Uomini
Yes, absolutely. I think anybody who spends time with any animal really gets to know, gets an intuition of this call. So of course that's the first thing that we sort of, this is the first thing that we notice. But then we need to scientifically validate it with these cases and patterns. So yes, there's certainly, I think, for example, that we do start to recognize the individuals, for example, but we do really need to prove it by some acoustic analyses. And so the most beautiful outcome would be if we can show that the intuitions that we have are really validated through the statistics.
Jonas
Okay, thank you very much. One last thing. What would be your, what would be your anticipation of this? Do you think your intuition might have like 90% chance of getting validated by the statistical data or 80%? What do you think?
Natalie Uomini
I'd say 50, 50%. Because I think really our intuitions are, it's like in a sense are based on our own mental statistics. Right. But then, on the other hand, we also have a lot of preconceptions, biases that we bring to it. So this is why we have to be a little careful. Like I wouldn't trust just an intuition. So I would really want to test it, give it a hard test with those approaches. So I think I would really say there have been some times in examples from other species where people's intuition were shown to be wrong. So it's really. Yeah, I would give it 50%.
Jonas
Thank you very much.
Diana Reiss
Thanks for those great questions. Jonas, a few people have asked, Natalie, you referred to before that in terms of open science, you have a database that's shareable. Again, one of the people is asking, if is there a link to a database. That can be accessed at the moment?
Natalie Uomini
No, it's just hard drives right now. And so the next step needs to be first cleaning those files to remove like any human videos and audio clips that might be inside. And then the next step is to find a way to put them online somehow publicly. So at the moment I haven't found a solution yet, but it's going to take a lot of pre processing before they can be ready to go online.
Diana Reiss
Well, Natalie, this is something that interspecies Internet can perhaps help with. Vint and Neil can attest to this. I don't know if Peter's here, but we recently helped support getting Roger Payne's humpback whale data digitized. Some of it had been digitized earlier. We helped get with a grant also with the Jeremy Coller Foundation to get the rest of that digitized. And now we're going to be hosting that so on through Mark Graham's efforts with the Wayback Machine. So we should open up that conversation. So perhaps we can help with some of this as well. Getting it.
Natalie Uomini
Fantastic.
Diana Reiss
At least I'm not saying we would digitize. You probably have it digitized, but for storage, Vint, I mean, do you. I think that's doable for us too.
Natalie Uomini
Right. Because originally I started uploading them onto the Max Planck servers and those I can provide a public link. But the thing is those are that I maxed out the, the limits on those very quickly. So it's just. I think it's. Yeah, right now it's the size that's too high for what we have available.
Diana Reiss
I think we might be able to help with that. And again, we'll follow up easily. We'll follow up after this.
Natalie Uomini
Thank you.
Diana Reiss
Yeah, and I think one of the other things I just want to mention is that so many of us sort of share that goal of having. We have these large databases, we have them with dolphins, others have them with birds. And I think we can really start sharing and getting into conversations about the things that we have in common and try to help find solutions that we can all benefit from. I think that's one of the spirits of the Interspecies Internet is to bring forms of people together who have shared problems, shared goals, and try to find mutual solutions.
Natalie Uomini
Absolutely.
Diana Reiss
This is a perfect example of how we can help move forward. I'm looking for some other questions. Does anybody have any questions? Other questions? They might. I have a few, but I'm deferring to other people.
Natalie Uomini
I'm trying to look through the chat here.
Diana Reiss
There are a lot of wonderful comments about talk. I'm looking for questions.
Will Davis
Nat Holden has just put one in the chat, wondering what local knowledge or Stories exist about these crows.
Natalie Uomini
Yeah. Oh, thanks for this question. Well, that's exactly my next research field trip. So actually, the pandemic has really blocked everything. But as soon as New Caledonia reopens, I have a field assistant who's going to go and document the local legends about crows. And I've actually had some initial talks with some local tribal people and they, they have a rich, rich stories about crows. They have mythology. For example, the crows are taboo. So it's really interesting that traditional. The indigenous people of New Caledonia do hunt a lot of native wildlife, but they really don't touch the crows. And they also consider the crows to be messengers. Some people say they can even understand what the crows are saying, and especially they would, for example, not touch the remains of crows. So there seems to be a special place for the crow. And I don't know if that's because they've been perhaps cooperating through their time. So the crows have been on New Caledonia for probably a million years, maybe we don't quite know, but humans have only been there for 3,000 years. So in fact, the humans are newcomers. And it's possible that as soon as they arrived, they came to some cooperation or interactions with the crows. And so they anyway, certainly have a very rich legend and lore about crows that will be worth understanding more. So I'm actually making very careful, a very respectful survey because the people there are quite concerned about Western anthropologists who just come and take information and never give anything back. So what I've been doing in my work is organizing collaborative work with the local people. So I'm really looking forward to pursuing that further.
Diana Reiss
Natalie, I had a question for you. I was really interested in what you were talking, what you showed about that young crow that didn't have input from conspecifics that started showing was imitating a variety of sounds from other animals. And it was reminiscent of things that have been reported with lots of species. With other vocal learners. Sam Ridgeway and his colleagues talked about a beluga whale knock who was a juvenile, not with other beluga whales, imitating human speech. We know harbor seals. There's the famous Hoover, who was housed outside of the New England Aquarium. Again, harbor seals, we believe, are also vocal learners and would imitate what sounded like inebriated old guys who are hanging out around him going, “ha, ha, ha. What are you doing? What are you doing?”. I mean, remarkable imitation of their social partners. We certainly know the dolphins, you know, other cetaceans, like beluga whales. Many of the cetaceans are vocal learners, and they've imitated sounds of jackhammers when, you know, in their environment. It seems that what's compelling in terms of interspecies communication is that these young animals, when their vocalizations are somewhat malleable, particularly when they don't have input from conspecifics, seem to be acoustically and socially aware at some levels. And I think that social awareness is quite important for any kind of interspecies communication, that they're aware of other sounds of others. But there's this somehow drive or motivation to engage at least vocally. And maybe that's an important part for us to all think about, you know, is getting into. And it's the heart of. It's how you began your talk, talking about the fact that if we're getting into communication and interspecies communication, it's a matter of sharing information with others that we're aware of. And again, if we define communication, it's social process of, you know, sharing information. So my question would be if you could imagine creating an interface that you could take into the field so that they had control. Because it's so beautiful the way you're giving these animals choice and control. You don't have the ir, but you don't have the consignment form. But you found a lovely way to work with them and say, it's your choice if you want to do this and show us what kind of interface could you imagine if someone was going to give you the opportunity to say, oh, we'll write you a check, design this system?
Natalie Uomini
Yeah, thanks for your question. I mean, I think that your point about the social awareness is really important one because, of course, yeah, some of the examples we see on YouTube of talking ravens, for example, they do have this bond with their owner. So it is most certainly about who you're interacting with. Has to have a big part to play in terms of an interactive device. I mean, I could see some kind of push button system, you know, keypad, keyboard thing. Those are working well for dolphins and they're working well for horses and dogs and all sorts. So I think, you know, it's something that the bird could peck on with its beak. I'm sure they could visually recognize symbols. I mean, we know from Irene Pepperberg's work that they have visual. Birds in general have very good visual acuity. So I'm sure that they can really see. You could design little buttons that look different. I think that would be no problem. But they would really need to be linked to some outcome that the bird is interested in. So at the moment, the only thing we have found in our interactions is that we can provide food. That's how they see us at the moment. And I don't know what else we could be to them. So I think that remains to be seen.
Diana Reiss
Yeah. Have you. And have you. The other question. I don't want to monopolize this, but I'm so fascinated by this. If anybody else has. Hands up. I'm not seeing it. Have you provided other kinds of unusual items to look at their reaction to novelty?
Natalie Uomini
Yes.
Diana Reiss
Could you talk about neophobia versus, you know, what do you see with that? I was just curious.
Natalie Uomini
Yeah, thanks. I mean, it's very interesting. So we did try to weigh them in the field because the. They do have a sexual dimorphism. The males tend to be larger than females. So we also put a scale, a digital scale down to try to get them would put forward food on top. That was really interesting. It took them about a week before they actually got on that scale. So they were very somehow neophobic about that. But the strange thing is that we are cameras. We have small automatic cameras all over right up by the feeding logs. And they will approach them no problem. They really seem to be. They have a very selective fear somehow. We're not sure if it's that the scale is larger than the bird, Whereas the small cameras are perhaps not as big. The bird, perhaps it's just about the size it might have been the coloration or the shininess, something like that. And so we also tried a mirror test. We set up a mirror and we had to actually stop this after a few hours because the bird just freaked out, completely freaked out and started attacking it and wouldn't stop. So we could see that this was causing too much distress. So we immediately removed it. But I think the. I have read meanwhile some other papers where they said that if the mirror is like small, very small, much smaller than the actual animal, that perhaps they can get used to it. Because I do believe that they would. I think they could recognize themselves. There's no reason not to. But I think it's just a matter of how the mirror is presented. So I think perhaps, yes, some more work on there, carefully designing those experiments without causing too much distress.
Diana Reiss
Yeah, I just wonder how long were they exposed to the mirror?
Natalie Uomini
Well, we left. We left it up. But I mean we had a. We were observing the whole time. So we actually we. We decided to stop after a few hours because literally the bird was just attacking it for like three hours solid. And we thought if this continues, he's not going to get any food today. So. Yeah, yeah. But they did, you know, eventually with the scale that they were initially afraid of, they eventually got used to that. So there was really like, the reaction to the scale was not at all of attack. They just simply. They got really long sticks and tried to poke it. So it seemed more like curiosity. And we do know that they do use tools also to prod at unknown things like spiders. So they have this. They do have curiosity, but they also seem to be able to recognize harmless objects like static cameras.
Diana Reiss
I think we. Thank you, Natalie. We have one more time for one more question. Jonas, you had one related to what Natalie was just talking about. You want to pose it or do you want me to read it?
Jonas
Excuse me, I don't know what you're pointing at.
Diana Reiss
I'm looking at. Jonas, you have a question. You made a suggestion like maybe doing an acoustic mirror, playing their own calls back to them.
Natalie Uomini
Yep. That would be. Yeah, thanks. It would be a good thing to try. So with those playback experiments, for sure. Yeah. We'd have to think about carefully playing the individual who's not present at the time, so that also, you also need to have good tracking for that. So once we get some GPS trackers on the birds, we'll be able to really play with some. Some really clever playback experiments.
Diana Reiss
Well, I think we're going to end this day now. I think this has been a wonderful Q and A session. Natalie, thank you for such a fascinating talk. It's just been wonderful having you here to share all this wonderful information with us. I think we all look forward to hearing more.
Natalie Uomini
It's been a real pleasure. Thanks for all. I've saved the chat and I'll be able to read it once I log off. It's been a real pleasure to be here.
Diana Reiss
Thank you. And thank you all for joining us today. Natalie, thanks again so much.
Natalie Uomini
Thanks for the invitation.
Diana Reiss
Have a good one. Take care, everybody.
