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Dolphin whistle decoders win $100k interspecies communication prize

Coller-Dolittle award won by US team for discovering call that triggers avoidance and could be used as alarm signal

The judging panel was led by Yossi Yovel, professor of zoology at Tel Aviv University, whose own team has previously used machine-learning algorithms to unpick the meaning of squeaks made by bats as they argue. Jonathan Birch, aprofessor of philosophy at London School of Economics and one of the judges, said the main thing stopping humans from cracking the code of animal communication was a lack of data. “I think one of the main benefits of these advances is that they could finally demonstrate that animals’ communication systems can be just as sophisticated and effective for use in the environments in which their users have evolved, as human language is for our species,” she said.

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