Is Anyone Listening: What Animals Are Saying to Each Other and to Us

By Denise L. Herzing

University of Chicago Press 2024

The subject of animal communication brings out that noxious mix of banal and patronizing thinking in most human communicators who have ever attempted to demystify it by putting pen to paper— or worse, by pontificating on ethically wobbly rostrums. Either the subject isn't plumbed to the depths of its complexity, or nuance is thrown out the window in favour of condescending anthropocentricity. In her new book, Is Anyone Listening: What Animals Are Saying to Each Other and to Us, author Denise Herzing tackles the broad topic of nonhuman animal communication in all its fascinating and challenging scope, and attempts to provide an accessible entry into the field of zoosemiotics, ill served in the annals of popular science.

Drawing on her four decades of dolphin research, Herzing unravels the workings behind interspecies communication— the many ways it is achieved amongst social species, the actual mechanics related with the different senses uses to communicate, and developments in the way humans have studied the phenomenon through the ages. She highlights the fact that while sound's ability to travel long distances and encode large amounts of information is highly advantageous in human communication, hearing itself is "not vital to the potential of language comprehension or production in other species". Animals use a variety of senses while communicating, from gestural signals in chimpanzees, or light polarization in bees, to colour changing in squids. Whales and dolphins use a wide array of complicated acoustic signals, much of which is outside the hearing range of humans. She discusses multimodal communication systems, and the ways in which each sensory system has potential to be adapted in different ways, and how this sheds light on the subtleties hiding under most animal communication, such as the ways in which even nonhuman animals modify the signals they send to hide or distort information.

The author avoids a common pitfall encountered in any such undertaking, that of considering animal communication only where it impinges upon the human. She talks about the fishers and bottlenose dolphins who have been working together for generations in Brazil, or the indicator birds guiding sub-Saharan hunters to beehives for honey, but she also highlights examples of interspecies communication not involving humans, such as converging whistle structures between different species of dolphins when they are together, or that of a Scottish dolphin producing porpoise-like clicks when in the presence of porpoises, adjustments meant to convey a message akin to that of a human mimicking a local dialect to say "I am like you".

While the book explores some general findings in the human quest to crack animal communication, from well known researcher-animal pairings like Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Dian Fossey on mountain gorillas, and Cynthia Moss on African elephants, or the work being done with prairie dogs and vervet monkeys on the features of their communication indicating a presence of "referential labels", the bulk of the narrative builds upon the author's own speciality with dolphins. She lists the requirements that humans have placed to determine what is and isn't a language, the need to prove a presence of features like time displacement, abstract idea transmission, combinatorial signals, recursiveness, and others, and goes to discuss what one can say about these features in dolphin communication today.

She details the developments in recording techniques for dolphin research, from dropping a hydrophone from the side of a boat to the present day use of highly sophisticated hydrophone arrays and underwater camera equipment that records vocalizations well outside human hearing range and also helps correlate sound with the visual behaviours of the dolphins. She argues for the critical importance of gathering metadata through these methods, as:

what we call metadata is just part of the larger encoding or signal to the species, but as human observers, we often separate these events into mechanical moves (physical postures, etc.) and players ... [but] the most difficult to gather is historical information. How often did one animal get chased by a predator? Did it witness its sibling being killed? Did it have trouble finding food the last drought? All these historical factors can play into an animal's behavior and are probably the reason there are variations in behavioral patterns that challenge our interpretations ... Although the personalities and relationships of animals in their own groups can make studies more difficult, it is exactly this element that we are trying to understand ... metadata is perhaps a behavioral biologist's most powerful tool.

Such a paragraph is a good example of the intense curiosity inherent in this book, and the author's laudable intentions of considering animal individuality over the conception of animal societies as just a numerical concatenation. She argues that a paradigm shift in the field of animal communication is imminent in an era waking up to the power of large datasets and the secrets that they can reveal under the operating sway of complicated machine learning tools. Some of the most fascinating parts of this book are those that elucidate the rise of artificial intelligence in unearthing language-like structures in animal communication, tools that belie any consideration of these social animals not showing cognitive flexibility or not having a considerable complexity of information and emotional responses in their repertoires.

But more work still needs to be done in order to prove the existence of any structure, order, or grammar in animal communication, or things like time displacement and referential labels. This book is a passionate plea for such research to be prioritised and funded, but always undertaken with a conception of the animals as mutually curious colleagues rather than as research subjects. A "reverence for life" is necessary for a planet overrun with a dominant species bent on putting itself on a pedestal already tilting on the edge of an ecological abyss; a need to entertain the possibility that when nudged, other animals may also ring with the sound of infinity.

By Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi