[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LULU MILLER: Hey there. Lulu here. It is the end of the summer, and here in North America we are just beginning to leave behind arguably the loudest season for animal noises. Just mosquitoes buzzing and crickets chirping and birds singing.

LULU: And today, we have a story that is about that wall of noise that you can encounter when you walk into the grassland or forest or jungle. Only we have a story about two very clever humans who began to decode that wall of noise down into actual language. They began to understand and decipher the words, so to speak, that the animals were saying. And that allowed them to eavesdrop and learn the sort of surprising things that animals are actually talking about.

LULU: Yes, this is all real science, this is all real stuff. It's a very fun story, and I'm gonna just kick it off, hand it over to Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Here we go!

ROBERT KRULWICH: So we're gonna tell you two tales here.

JAD ABUMRAD: Two different places. The first, a jungle. And the second ...

ROBERT: A prairie.

JAD: Right. Jungle gets us started, and then the prairie later. This is a story, this first one, that we heard about ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, yeah. I'm ...

JAD: ... from Ari.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: I'm Ari Daniel Shapiro. I'm a public radio producer in Boston.

JAD: And Ari recently met a guy. I think a German guy.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He's Swiss.

JAD: Oh, okay. Sorry.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: His name is Klaus Zuberbuehler.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Hey Ari, it's Klaus.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he's a professor of psychology ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: At the University of St. Andrews.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which is in Scotland.

JAD: And where does this story actually take place? Because ...

ROBERT: Where's the jungle?

JAD: Yeah.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, maybe the best place to start is to kind of describe the scene where we are.

JAD: Okay.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which is in the Tai forest.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Tai forest.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which is in the Ivory Coast in Africa.

ROBERT: So it's not in Thailand?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: No, it's not. It's T-A-I.

ROBERT: T-A-I. Okay.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. And Klaus describes the jungle as this thick, sensory world.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Very dark, very moist, and very, very green.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And you can't really see for more than 15 to 20 feet.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And I mean, sometimes you feel like you walk through a big cathedral of dark trees, and you don't see very much because all the animals, obviously very shy and run away.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: I mean, is it still?

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: [laughs] No, it's—it is very, very noisy.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It's a din. It's just this kind of sonic chaos.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Chaos. All these insects and birds and bats and mammals. It's almost as if they compete for acoustic space. So it is very, very loud. I mean, the main sensation you have in the beginning really is that you're just completely lost.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So it's 1991.

JAD: All right.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he figured he had to start somewhere, so he focused his attention on a kind of monkey.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: A very beautiful monkey, I think.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Called the Diana monkey.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: This mix of black, white, and sort of reddish.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Diana monkeys live up in the treetops, which can be as high as a hundred feet off the ground.

JAD: Wow!

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They eat fruits and they eat insects, and they're chattering.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: A cacophony of calls.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Which to him, of course ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: You know, as a newcomer to the forest ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... was all just noise.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Just a little bit imagine, like, a child trying to learn a language, which initially must just sound like a string of sounds that you can't really understand, and then, you know ...

JAD: So what did he do?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, he started provoking the monkeys into making different kinds of noises. For instance, he'd walk out into the forest with a boombox ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: A speaker.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... and play the sound of the Diana monkey's most feared predator: the leopard.

JAD: He would just play the sound into the trees?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yep.

JAD: Whoa!

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And all of a sudden ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Suddenly ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: ... they start leaping around the branches, hopping around.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: ... you know, you see all this motion, and ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And they make this one particular call.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: You know, these very loud alarm calls.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: This one here.

ROBERT: Meaning what?

JAD: Yeah, are they just saying, like, run, or is it something more specific?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, here's where it gets a little bit more interesting. Next step, he brought that same cassette player out.

JAD: Pointed it at the trees, hit play, all that?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yep. But this time he plays ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: The shrieks of a crowned eagle.

JAD: Eagles eat monkeys?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, they do.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: They attack from above.

ROBERT: I've heard about them. They're very scary. They come flying in with their talons or their beaks, and they hit you in the head sharply and kill you instantly.

JAD: Oof!

ROBERT: And then you fall to the ground.

JAD: Yeah. And so what do the monkeys do when they hear this?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They make that sound.

JAD: Same one?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, that's what he thought, but when he went back to the lab and started looking at the sounds on the computer, comparing one to the other: eagle, leopard, eagle, leopard, he realized that they're actually slightly different.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: In the acoustic details of the calls. And it's something that is very difficult to hear when you really only see it in the spectrogram, which is kind of a visual representation of these calls.

JAD: This is on the computer?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: But interestingly, once you've seen that, and once you know what to pay attention to, you go out into the forest and suddenly you do hear these differences, which you haven't heard before.

ROBERT: So you're saying when they hear a call "Leopard coming!" they go up the tree, but when they hear "Eagle coming!" they run down the tree?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Exactly. Exactly.

ROBERT: So it's really kind of like a word. They—like a word. Well, that's kind of amazing.

JAD: Let's pull out for a second, because this guy actually got us thinking, honestly. How much language actually is out there in the wild? Like, what do we know? What's the state of what we know right now? And that question led us out of the forest just for a second, and to a place and a creature that we just didn't think would be a part of this conversation at all. And that creature is ...

ROBERT: The prairie dog!

JAD: Whoo! Prairie dogs.

ROBERT: So here's the thing: prairie dogs are these little rodent-like animals. They live under the ground in burrows, and when their community is invaded, they pop out of the burrow and they go, "Oh, oh! Here comes the—whatever."

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Sounds kind of like, "Chee, chee, chee, chee. Chee, chee, chee, chee."

JAD: So we spoke with this guy.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: My name is Con Slobodchikoff, professor emeritus at Northern Arizona University.

JAD: Who's spent a whole lot of time ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Sitting out in the colonies.

JAD: ... recording prairie dog calls. And he now believes that these simple little rodents are like nature's wordsmiths.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Well, the thing is that, initially I recorded ...

JAD: For instance, he began by telling us that the prairie dogs have different kinds of chees ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: For different kinds of predators.

JAD: For example ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Humans, coyotes ...

ROBERT: And dogs.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Right.

JAD: Is this the kind of thing that we would actually be able to hear the difference between the calls?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: I'm guessing that you could hear the difference.

ROBERT: You want to try it, Jad?

JAD: Yeah. Soren, Could you just play those samples?

SOREN WHEELER: All right. So here's one.

[prairie dog chirping]

SOREN: This is another one.

[prairie dog chirping]

ROBERT: All right.

JAD: Okay.

SOREN: Here we go. This is a third.

[prairie dog chirping]

JAD: Those represent different predators?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Yep.

ROBERT: Huh. I can't tell the difference.

JAD: Can you? I mean, do you know what they are?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: My guess is: human, dog, coyote.

SOREN: Con was right.

ROBERT: Con was right?

JAD: Wow!

ROBERT: Well naturally, we wondered how ...

JAD: How did he do that?

ROBERT: Yeah. He told us that at first, just like you and I, he couldn't figure out how to distinguish between these sounds, but he took the sound back to the lab ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Where we had a machine that allowed us to measure a series of frequency and time elements in the call.

ROBERT: And what this computer does is it takes the sound that the prairie dogs make and it essentially looks inside for the ingredients inside the sound.

JAD: Yeah, like a—well, it's kind of hard to hear with a chirp because—it's just hard. So let me demonstrate crudely with this other sound. I plucked this at random from my library. So this is kind of like a buzz.

[low-pitch buzzing]

ROBERT: Okay.

[low-pitch buzzing]

JAD: Okay? Let me just loop it so we can hear it better.

[looped buzzing]

JAD: So here you've got this buzz, which sounds to us like a solid piece of noise, but get an EQ and take away all the highs. So now you've got just the base.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Now you'll notice if you add the highs back in real slowly, these little hidden overtones will pop out like a—there's one.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: There's another.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: Third.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Fourth.

ROBERT: Uh-huh.

JAD: So in other words, this sound is filled with little ghost notes that we can't hear. And certainly the same is true of this sound.

[prairie dog chirping]

JAD: Except in the case of the prairie dogs, it seems their ears are tuned to hear all the different sounds within the chirp. Probably sounds to them like this whole layer cake of tones.

ROBERT: And Con's computer noticed that the noise they made when a human walked through their village was different in tone from the noise they made when a coyote walked through their village. It was consistently different.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: But there was a problem.

ROBERT: When he zoomed in on the "Uh oh, here come the human" calls ...

[prairie dog chirping]

ROBERT: You can hear?

JAD: And he looked at them really closely. He saw that from one human call to the next, there was a lot of subtle variation.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Much, much more than I would expect.

ROBERT: And that's when it hit him.

JAD: What if ...

ROBERT: What if ...

JAD: What if!

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: What if they could be describing the individual humans?

ROBERT: Oh!

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Now at that time, no one suspected that this might even be a possibility, but I thought, "Well, let's try it and see what happens."

JAD: So Con recruited four humans.

ROBERT: And he had them dress exactly the same: same boots, same blue jeans, same sunglasses. Everything the same except the color of their shirts.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: We had a person in a blue t-shirt, person in a green t-shirt, person in a yellow shirt, person in a gray shirt.

JAD: Then he asked each of them to walk through the prairie dog village ...

ROBERT: One by one.

JAD: Prairie dogs made their chirps.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: And when we analyzed the results, there were significant differences.

JAD: Like what kind?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: They essentially clustered around the colors.

ROBERT: Does that mean you think you can hear them saying, "Here comes the human in blue?"

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Right.

ROBERT: Versus "Here comes the human in yellow?"

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Right.

JAD: Really?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Oh, I was astounded. I was astounded.

ROBERT: And he was like, "Well, wait a second. These humans, they're not just different in their shirt colors. They're different in all kinds of ways."

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Some of the humans were taller, some of the humans were shorter.

JAD: So he went back, reanalyzed the chirps, looked a little more closely ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: And ...

JAD: ... he realized ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: ... we could tease out ...

JAD: That the prairie dogs were also commenting about ...

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: ... the general size of the human. Essentially, they were saying, "Here comes the tall human in the blue" versus "Here comes the short human in the yellow."

ROBERT: Wow!

JAD: And then he made another leap.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: And it was just ...

JAD: You know, since he was on a roll.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: ... off the wall idea at that time ...

ROBERT: He went back into the prairie dog field and he built two large wooden boxes.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Sitting on stilts.

JAD: A good distance from each other.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: 150 feet. And we strung wires between the two towers.

ROBERT: His team then made cardboard cutouts of three different shapes.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: A circle, a square and a triangle.

ROBERT: And then they ran them out along the wire, kind of like laundry fluttering above you in the breeze.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Each shape would emerge from one of the tower blinds and fly something like about three feet over the prairie dog town.

JAD: So literally, you would just kind of go—squeak, squeak, squeak, squeak—and out would come a triangle or a circle or a square?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Correct. And what we found was that the prairie dogs could tell the triangle from the circle very easily, but they could not seem to tell the difference between a square and a circle.

JAD: Huh. Why not?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Well, my guess is that triangles kind of look like hawks.

JAD: Hmm.

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Circles and squares kind of look like terrestrial predators.

JAD: Nonetheless, what you've got here is a little rodent with a remarkably big vocabulary, including but probably not limited to: short, fat, skinny, tall, blue, green, yellow, gray, coyote, human, hawk, triangle, and/or square.

ROBERT: Yay!

JAD: That's not bad!

ROBERT: Is the next step that you're going to perform a scene from The Winter's Tale and see whether the prairie dogs laugh at the right moments? What do you do next?

CON SLOBODCHIKOFF: Well, we just are scratching the surface of looking at this. For example, prairie dogs have a lot of calls which we call social chatters. One prairie dog will be feeding, and suddenly lift up its head and go, chitter chatter chitter chitter. And another prairie dog somewhere across the colony will lift up its head and go chatter chatter chitter chitter. But what does it mean? We have no way of getting at it. It could be just simply chatter chitter chitter, or it could be, "Do you know where Sam was last night?"

ROBERT: [laughs]

LULU: We'll be back in a moment.

LULU: All right, we're back. On with the story.

ROBERT: Now here's an interesting question: I mean, if a French couple were sitting next to me on the subway and they were saying, "Do you know where Sam was last night?" in French, if I don't speak French, I'm outside of that conversation. But a lot of people do speak French, and they can listen to French people talking. The question's then raised: if you live in the forest and you speak chimp or you speak eagle or you speak snake, would you ever be able to overhear or learn something from a neighborly species? In other words, is there an equivalent of listening to the other person talking French in the wild?

JAD: Hmm, good question.

ROBERT: And that brings us back to Klaus. You remember Klaus?

JAD: Yeah, the monkey guy.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah, the monkey guy. Well, Klaus was wondering the same thing.

JAD: And that's Ari Daniel Shapiro again, who introduced us to Klaus.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So take those alarm calls, for instance. He wanted to know whether different species of monkeys could understand each other.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Right, so ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And luckily for Klaus, there's, like, at least 10 different primate species living inside that Tai Forest.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: So there's ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: One, colobus monkeys. Two ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Spot-nosed monkeys.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Three, chimpanzees. Four ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Galagos.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Five ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Colobines.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Six, putty-nosed monkeys. Seven ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Mangabey species.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Eight ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Prosimians.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Nine ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Campbell's monkey.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And then the Dianas, 10.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Yeah, so it's a very rich primate fauna.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So Klaus's question was: could Diana monkeys understand the alarm calls of another one of these monkeys, the Campbell's monkey?

JAD: Oh, could they go across monkey lines, so to speak?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Exactly.

ROBERT: Hmm.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So he used that same setup from before.

JAD: The speaker thing where he plays the sound into the trees?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. And he played the eagle and leopard alarm calls from the Campbell's monkeys to the Dianas to see if they'd react.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And what we found there to our great surprise was that the Diana monkeys ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They understand it.

JAD: Really?

ROBERT: Really?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yep.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: They take that very, very seriously and respond to it very strongly.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: So a Diana monkey hearing a Campbell's eagle alarm call will respond as though there were an eagle, and will respond to the leopard alarm call as though there were a leopard. And vice versa.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And it doesn't stop there.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Klaus started playing the monkey calls to birds.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Such as hornbills.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yellow-casqued hornbill.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: It turns out that ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: They understand it.

JAD: The birds?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Yeah. These hornbills ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Are capable of discriminating these different monkey alarm calls.

ROBERT: Wow!

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: So it's a pretty substantial web species basically eavesdropping on each other's calls in these forests.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But Klaus himself, he was still on the outside of it all.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: It is that general sense of perhaps not really belonging there. But then ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He told me about this one day.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: I was working in the forest.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He had gone out for the day, and he'd gone out alone.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And I was very far away from camp.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And it was in the late afternoon, and he realized that he should probably be heading back to camp.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Because I still had to walk for something like 15, 20 kilometers back to camp.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he was walking past a kind of valley.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: And then I heard on the other side of the valley a monkey group giving leopard alarm calls, which doesn't happen that often.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: It was the first time that he wasn't actively listening, but he heard these monkeys make this call and recognized it.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: It was absolutely striking.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he was actually quite excited by this.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Because I was suddenly able to understand what the monkey's trying to say, so to speak.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Those monkeys had picked up a leopard.

ROBERT: Right beneath that sound, there the leopard would be.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Right. But, you know, those monkeys were way across the valley.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: So I didn't really think that much and walked on perhaps, you know, half a mile further down the road.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And the next group of Diana monkeys, still across the valley ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Start giving leopard alarm codes as well.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: And he kind of took notice of that. And then it happened a third time a few minutes later.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: What became clear to me very rapidly is that a leopard was ...

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Tracking him.

ROBERT: Oh!

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Of course, I couldn't see it because it was, you know, dense forest, but I assumed that the leopard saw me. And of course that—it's just one of these moments where you're totally alone, far, far away from camp.

ROBERT: What does he do?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: He kept walking. It happened a fourth group called leopard, and fifth group called leopard. And then the groups stopped calling.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: The only thing I could think of is to pick up a large branch.

JAD: [laughs] I shouldn't laugh. That's just terrifying.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Klaus, would that stick have done anything for you?

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: I doubt I really would have been able to do very much with a stick.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: But as he's standing there, stick in hand, he realizes he's just entered the forest. He's become ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: The 11th primate.

JAD: The 11th primate.

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Because there are those 10 other species of primate, and now ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Me. Suddenly I shifted from being the objective observer to being a sort of part of that whole crowd in there. Even though we're separated by 20, 30 millions of years of evolutionary history, you know, these humble creatures were able to teach me something about what was going on in the forest. And I mean, of course it wasn't intentional. They weren't trying to inform me or anything like that, but it was a very emotional experience.

JAD: So what happened? I mean, obviously he didn't get eaten. What happened?

ARI DANIEL SHAPIRO: Well, he made it back to camp. And he's not sure what happened to the leopard. The leopard must've slinked off into the forest. In the end, it became ...

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Just another story to tell each other in the evening, I suppose.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: Yeah.

KLAUS ZUBERBUEHLER: Yeah.

LULU: And that's it. Thanks so much for this story to Ari Daniel Shapiro. Thanks so much to you for listening to the noise and the words. And I am now so very excited to let you know that the next story that we will be dropping is a brand new Terrestrials! Terrestrials, if you haven't listened, is our show about the strangeness right here on Earth, hosted by me, specially made to be family friendly. Every episode has an incredible, almost fantastical-sounding story about an animal or plant or earthly phenomenon—but it's entirely true. We add lots of music, we even add original songs. It's kind of like Radiolab plus a musical. School of Rock, science style. I don't know. Come check it out. See if it's for you. That's starting in just two weeks, a whole new season of Terrestrials episodes headed your way.

LULU: Thanks so much for listening. Enjoy the tail-end of summer. See you in a couple spins of this noisy old planet of ours. Bye!

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Emma, and I live in Portland, Maine. Here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Valentina Powers, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton.]

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