In 2017, a group of scientists were struck by a startling realization – sperm whale vocalizations, that sound like clicks, resemble Morse Code to a great extent. It sowed the seeds for an ambitious project -- the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or Project CETI -- that would use artificial intelligence to translate these whale sounds such that humans would be able to understand them. The introduction of tech into studying animal behavior not only helps us understand them better -- but also, paradoxically, helps reveal our own limits as a species. This could go one of two ways: enable greater conservation efforts, or instil a hubris that could use the newfound knowledge of animal communication against them. It is not just whale communication that has been the subject of translation initiatives.

Colonies of naked mole rats develop dialects in their vocalisations that may help them distinguish between friends and foes. These dialects are influenced by each colony's queen, and become more varied if the queen dies. Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber) are extremely vocal creatures that live in colonies in which only one queen reproduces. To see whether their vocalisations help maintain their social structure, Alison Barker at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Germany and her colleagues recorded more than 36,000 greeting calls, from 166 naked mole rats in seven colonies raised in labs in Germany and South Africa. After identifying the acoustic features of these soft chirps, such as pitch, peak frequency and duration, the researchers used the calls to train a machine-learning algorithm.