How to Speak Whale
– with Tom Mustill
– Kate Armstrong
“Welcome to today's Interspecies Conversations lecture. My name is Kate Armstrong and I'm head of programming for the Interspecies Internet. And it's my pleasure to welcome you all on behalf of the trustees and our organization. So, this is a conversation lecture as part of a regular online lecture series that gives the opportunity and forum for leading professors, scientists, researchers and students to share and present their work that contributes to advancing and the acceleration and understanding of the diversity, forms and functions of communication in other species. So, we aim to showcase emerging ideas and have great, open, lively discussion about these. And this is a good space to get feedback and to share ideas.
Today, we're joined by writer and filmmaker Tom Mustill. And Tom is a wildlife filmmaker by trade. In 2015, he was Whale watching when a humpback whale breached onto his kayak and nearly killed him after a video of this event went viral. Scientists use AI to discover who the whale was, reconstruct its life story, and demonstrate that it wasn't actually trying to harm him. Tom was obviously fascinated by this process, and he spent four years meeting the pioneers in a new age of discovery, whose cutting edge developments in natural science and technology are taking us to the brink of decoding animal communication using remote sensors, big data and machine intelligence. And, Tom wrote a book about his findings titled “How to Speak Whale”. So, today he's going to give us a look at this space that he's been working in, where the science meets the public eye. So, he will talk about some whales, their giant mammalian brains and the sophisticated vocalizations and complex cultures, and how these offer one of the most realistic opportunities for us to understand how humans and animals can indeed converse. So, Tom will discuss what it would mean if we were to make contact, and, as the fantasy of Dr. Dolittle shows, promise of turning into reality. How can we protect the living world from these new powers and make sure that if we connect, we do not harm or exploit animals. So I'm going to hand over to Tom. Welcome.”
– Tom Mustill
“Thank you. I'm actually going to do an immediate handbrake turn, if that's all right, because that was the blurb that I sent early on, which normally goes with a sort of public talk for people who don't really know much about the history of animal communication and ethology or machine learning or citations. But I've watched the previous videos in this series and was sort of horrified/excited to see that almost everything I was going to say would be totally redundant based on what previous speakers had said and based on the existing knowledge in this community, because so many of you not only know a lot about this, you discovered it yourselves. And, so I've been around my two year old birthday as a daughter's birthday party, kind of throwing everything up in the air and making a very different talk, because I was trying to think about how I could be useful and of service to this group and what the most interesting conversation could come out of it. And, I think actually perhaps I'll go over very briefly what's in the book, but especially with Karen Bakker's beautiful talk last week and with Aza Raskin's (ESP) kind of context about machine learning and the other speakers in this series series, I think maybe the most interesting thing I could contribute and where the conversation could be interesting is about the context of this work, where it meets the public and why it's important and how people can connect to it. My background is I'm a wildlife filmmaker. I started out, I was trained as a zoologist and I worked as a conservation biologist. And I moved into wildlife documentary because I felt that the human beings were emotional creatures. And many of the emotional creatures that were my friends weren't taking steps in their lives to help the living world, not because they lacked information, but because they lacked connection to it and they lacked connection to the people involved in it. And, that is why I think this work, the work that is covered in “How to Speak Whale”, but also the wider work that's taking place within this group in this lecture series, is so important.
I think we're living through a period of enormous change. Obviously that's a cliche, but I don't think many of the practitioners in both science and sort of in animal behavior and communication science, or in my home fields of wildlife filmmaking realize how transformative the technologies we're using are and where they're leading us and where those inter intersect with the opinion of the general public. And as a conservation biologist, my concern is mainly how do the things we do make life better for the living, for the rest of life on Earth, and also for humans and their feeling of connection to the rest of life on Earth. So, I basically got rid of all of my talk and that's what I've tried to throw together today. So, forgive me if it's a bit rough and ready, but I think it will be much more interesting than hearing me rehash stuff that you're very, very familiar with. So let me start now. Also, I've never used PowerPoint. I'm a filmmaker. I either write words down so this, this could be awful. So forgive me on that front, but hopefully it'll be interesting. Right, can you see this? Great!
So, this is a picture of the bat biologist, Rodrigo Medellin. He's a Mexican biologist and he studies. That's a lesser long nosed bat which migrates through all of Mexico from the agave sort of zone up along the coast in this, what is called a nectar corridor, all the way up into the south of the United States and the Sonoran Desert where it feeds off the columnar cactuses and breeds and it does a migration. People hate bats. Making a wildlife documentary about a rare bat is very hard because most people don't want to watch a film about bats. So, the two tools we used were to connect the lives of bats to people by explaining that these bats pollinated the tequila agave. And without the bats there would be no tequila. So out of pure tequila based self interest, people should care. But we also tried to place the bats within a… We tried to make the bats seem relatable. We shot them with beautiful backlight and macro lenses. We had a light breeze over them like a sort of professional pet photo shoot. And, suddenly people could see the delicacy of their features and they could cast away their sort of horrible preconceptions about what the bats might be like. And many people after watching this film, decided that they actually really quite liked bats after all. Rodrigo is now the National Geographic Society's first Hispanic Explorer in residence. And I guess, I'm showing you this slide because nobody really remembered any of the facts from this film, although there were many facts in this film. Rodrigo's research is fascinating and really important in terms of conservation objectives. But by making people care about bats and put aside their preconceptions, the conservation outcomes of those bats were improved immeasurably. And that was an emotional process with artistic and emotional decisions made in it to help people connect. And, so that's really the sort of meta story of my talk today. It's about connection and where technology can help us connect. Because we couldn't have done this without infrared cameras. We couldn't have done it without thermal imaging cameras, drones, cable dollies, GPS transmitters. We couldn't have done it without being able to go to places that people weren't able to go to recently, and lots of other things that are very relevant for trying to speak whale. One second…one moment.
Okay. This is, in my view, the past. This is in Paris. This is the Museum of Zoology, and it is part of the Botanical Gardens there. And it is a giant room full of dead animals. And for, I think, much of the study of biology, this is what we've been looking at, which is bodies. We have gone around the world, we have grabbed animal bodies and we've assembled them into sort of relationship trees of their phylogenies or their family histories or how they, how, however we'd like to arrange them. And we've gone and looked at, compared and compared those bodies. And that is a really rational thing to do. It's a pragmatic thing to do. We didn't really have an alternative. If you went on an expedition in the 19th century and you wanted to relate the biology that you saw to other people, you had no way of showing them the behaviours of animals. You had no way of showing them the differences between individual animals. You could write them down. And literate people who had access to the libraries where those, those written letters and conversations, and scientific papers were sent could access them. But most people got to see the diversity of life on earth through bodies. And I think biology in the 20th century became very body based. That's all my education. I went to the University of Cambridge. A lot of it was just comparing the bodies of animals and what the functions of those bodies were. Although, we looked a bit at animal personality or the differences between individual animals and behavior. I think for a long time, because we haven't been able to capture behavior, because we haven't been able to transmit and show each other behavior and communication, the field has been very body based. And, that's what the perception of the general public has been.
And so, and this is us making a documentary with some kangaroos. This is a female kangaroo called Ella. Ella was an orphaned kangaroo. She was found as a joey in the pouch of her mother who'd been hit by a car by the side of a road. And the man who rescued her hand raised her with the intention of releasing her back into the wild. But she was too habituated. So she lived in a reserve with him in Australia. Ella was a very unusual kangaroo. She had a particular fondness for carrots which would allow us to place inside her pouch a very small, very non hot camera with a dimmable led around it that we designed especially. And we could film the developing joey inside her pouch from essentially a neonate. When they're a jelly bean, we're about that long to. Until the joey took its head out of the pouch and took its steps for himself in the world. We had about one carrot length of time for each attempt at this until Ella would get really angry with us and try and kick us. And it was quite intimidating and scary. These were some of the first ever images inside the pouch of a kangaroo. And although researchers had looked inside before, we had the budgets of a TV production. So we could make these tools and we could take them into the field and we could record animal developmental biology and behavior, and then we could transmit them to tens or hundreds of millions of people who then had a different understanding of what kangaroos were and what they were like. I think like many wildlife filmmakers, I was just always trying to get a beautiful shot. I took it for granted that we had these new, wonderful tools. And almost as soon as they became available, I became focused on how to use them, and I didn't give much thought to how unusual it was that we had access to them and what the implications of that was.
And, I think a similar thing has been happening in biology. As soon as we get as in the scientific element of biology, not the communication side that I'm in, that we are so excited by our tools, we forget how new they are and we don't potentially look at where they're taking us and what the impact of them could be. So, here is us doing something that would have been impossible when I was at university and almost unthinkable 80 years before, you know, beaming images from inside a kangaroo's pouch to millions of people around the world, who previously would only have been able to see a kangaroo as a pet in a zoo or a skeleton in a zoological museum.
So, this is the book that I've just written, “How to Speak Whale”. This is my attempt at trying to both introduce the book to you, but also showing the different communication strategies of the publishers in different countries. We relate to animals in different ways based on our different cultures. You can see this in how book publishers try to sell books about animals to people in different cultures. I find it very interesting that the Anglophone editions, the US and the UK ones, although we share a common language, have a totally different stylistic approach and way of trying to find an audience. The Swedes have gone for a sort of Jeff Koons Zeppelin silvery beautiful thing, and the Germans have gone for a sort of very classical woodcut style. These are tools for communicating natural wonder to the general public. And I guess the ultimate thing is that there is no magic bullet. Each culture has its own way of communicating based on what people know and feel like already.
So, this is how I got involved in this story. As was mentioned before, I was kayaking in Monterrey Bay in 2015 when a humpback whale breached out of the water and landed on myself and my friend Charlotte. We want a kayak tour. I should add that scientists had told us to do it. I've been visiting the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute to check out their new remote vehicles. And one of the engineers there had looked out the window and said, you should go and check out these whales. And the best way to do it is in a kayak. It was an unusually quiet and calm day. It was also a very unusual period where there were an enormously high aggregation of feeding humpbacks in the bay because of a big school of fish that had been there for many weeks and had been drawing them in. We were paddling back to shore having had a very enjoyable time. Keep doing our best to keep our distance, but it's quite hard when they pop up near you and come towards you in a kayak or boat. When this whale did a full breach and it landed on the front of the vessel, its pectoral fin hit the nose of our kayak about 2cm from Charlotte's toes, and it pulled us all underwater. I still can't really understand how we were unharmed, but somehow we were unharmed. My feet were around the little pedals that you use as rudders. And I don't know how you can quickly exit a sort of waist size hole at speed with your feet around pedals without being hurt. But neither of us were hurt at all, thankfully, and we went back to shore and I thought no one would believe us. But the reason I show this slide is because this was taken in 2015. So, 2015 is a really important and interesting point because this was during the explosion of cell phones and smartphones, which we now take for granted that you probably, if something was interesting was to happen outside your window now, you would be able to take a phone out and immediately start video recording it. This was not something that was normal five years prior to this incident. The reason that any record of this exists is because a tourist filmed it. Because they were filming happened to be pointing away from where the humpbacks were towards shore. That is quite an unlikely coincidence, but it's one that's becoming more and more normal. We now feel that if we are somewhere and we see something, we have the capacity to record it and, and share it with other people with a standardized machine that has a GPS position on it to time and location stamp, standardized video and audio recordings and all sorts of other information. These cell phone devices were designed to allow humans to communicate and share photographs of each other doing things. But obviously now they're being turned and able to be used for recording other non-humans doing stuff and sharing those discoveries and recordings with other humans.
Just after this happened, a very, very large scale citizen science program called Happy Whale launched. In fact Happy Whale was launched just I think two weeks before they began doing the program. Two weeks before this happened to us. So, in another coincidence, Happy Whale is a database of humpback whale and now other whale tail flukes that was built off the long term databases of scientists who've been collecting humpback whale tail flukes to identify individuals and population movements. But then building into that the photographs taken by whale watchers and citizen scientists like the captains of whale watching boats, they were able to identify the whale that leapt onto us. And I've been able to follow the life of this whale ever since. That is a strange thing to happen. Not only that a giant animal leaps onto you while you're in the sea and somebody films it, but then you're able to follow its life after that point and fit it into the context of the lives of the other animals in that population. And Happy Whale has gone from a very small outfit back then to a very, very big global outfit with multiple operators of whale watching boats in all oceans and feeding into it. And I think now they feel that they've got nearly every single adult humpback male in the northern Pacific identified, which would have been a total pipe dream at the point when that whale leapt onto us. I think we should be careful about taking these changes for granted. We accept them very quickly but that is colossal change and it is driven by this confluence of public interest and human derived technologies and professional science. Sort of the spearheading really work by professional scientists.
In my personal story, it's developed again last week Ted Cheeseman who designed Happy Whale told me that they built a new real time ID program. So they use artificial intelligence. Well they use like a machine learning, like a image recognition technology to match the tail flukes that are in their databases to the tail flukes of photographs coming in from various places. The machines can do it much faster than the humans who used to do it and now they can do it in real time, accessing every single whale tail fluke in their database. The first whale they happened to test this out on last week. A guy was in a boat and he ID'd the whale on the phone to Ted and it was the whale that leapt onto us, which is another strange coincidence. But fortunately he's a scientist and he got a DNA tag off the whale and he placed a satellite transmitter on it. So now 2015, yeah. Seven years after that, well, leapt onto us. I know who the whale is. I will know its gender, I will know its genetics. I can follow its movement from space from here in London. This is quite a strange thing to be happening. And my case is a small case, but one of many others. And I think what's most interesting about this is that this has changed humpback whales for me from being humpback whales to being this individual. And I follow its life story and I find it fascinating. And this is happening to my neighbors here in London. They, most of them didn't have parents who could teach them how to identify birds. They use Merlin. They can identify which species of bird is in their neighborhood. Using the AI enabled species recognition for the chirps and the sounds the birds make. There are bird feeders out there that now will take pictures of the birds that come to your garden and identify the individuals. They will not only help you know which bird is coming to your garden, so you can establish a, like a kind of relationship with it if you'd like to, but they will also send that information back into the databases of the, the bird feeder designers. So now that conservationists can have access to know the population dynamics, movements of individual birds within a human matrix, that's a pretty weird thing to be happening. I think these technologies are helping us transition from looking at animals as bodies to looking at them as individuals.
And a really interesting case study of this is with the whale Fran, the humpback whale that many of you will be familiar with or potentially on the west coast of the US she had been followed for many years by whale watching boats and scientists. When I was out there filming, I met a man who went out over 100 days whale watching a year, a citizen with his DSLR and he really wanted to see Fran. When Fran finally returned with a calf after many years, he wept with joy along with many other whale watchers. When Fran was hit in a ship strike and killed, I think it was about four or five months ago, they mounted a vigil for her. First Nations representatives came and did a ceremony and then they used this really sad moment to try and generate change. They got petitions and they petitioned the legislature to change the vessel speed within certain areas of the marine protected area there. That is an example of technology being used by humans to connect, to make an immediate connection with an individual animal that generates conservation outcomes for the species in that area. That is fascinating to me and I think that is the sort of wider context for wanting to decode the communications of other animals. For me, it is that they are windows into connection for us that both allow us to have wonder, but also to have a richer form of connection to those animals, whether those animals have any idea of this or not, that hopefully will improve the outcomes for those animals. I'm sorry this is waffly, but maybe you can see how I've been trying to sort of reconstruct this from a summary of a book into something that's maybe more interesting for you.
Oh, yeah. This is what's going on in the world. According to Strategy Analysis, there are many different estimates for the numbers of smart or cell phones in use in the world. But we're now approaching a point where the majority of humans on the planet own a smartphone. So the sorts of data sampling, the sorts of connection to the natural world, if people want it available, is enormous and ubiquitous. Do any of you use programs like Merlin, the Bird Call Identifier? Yeah. And in your gardens, do you ever use Picture This or any of the plant ID applications? Okay, I'm seeing a lot of nods. So, I was hesitant about this. I think I fetishized the idea that some sage human who'd spent their life outdoors would take me by the hand and point out all of the birds and teach me their calls and walk me through the meadows, and point out all the trees and help me identify them. It never happened. I'm almost 40. It's taken these tools in my cell phone, which I also. Because it eats all of my time to help me understand the living world around me, here in London. And I'm not alone in this. And I think that is really, really interesting because I think a lot of attention go in the. In these conversations and looking back at the videos that in this series has been on the sort of forefront of science and trying to decode animal communication and where that might be going. But I think the main driver of the direction and the impact of will actually be the consumer side. It will be where most people are getting value in their lives, I think where people can understand the expressions of their pets and get insight into their internal worlds, how they're feeling, if they're sick. The commercial side of that would be huge, but I think also the human love for that would be huge. And I think those are the portals that will drive more esoteric work like Project CETI and the stuff that I've written about and a lot of the research that Karen mentioned in Bioacoustics and I think that's a really good thing because there is a risk with this work of it just seeming interesting. I don't know if you find this, but when I was trained in animal behavior at Cambridge, it was kind of viewed as a bit of a soft thing for biologists who maybe weren't as kind of, I don't know, didn't perhaps have the acumen of the geneticists or some of the sort of the evo devo lot. I feel that this field is seen as nice and interesting, but not necessarily vital and in need of huge funding support and also public scrutiny and public engagement. And I think that drawing the general public into ways of understanding this work is the thing that's going to make that difference. It's going to make them care about it. And if they care it then about it, then politicians will care about it. And then funding decisions will be made to allow things like trying to understand the communications of other species not be seen as a kind of nice, interesting idea, but seen as a vital idea. Because we fund CERN to look at like subatomic particles or particles that might not even exist. We put telescopes into space with huge amounts of money. Why aren't there these giant levels funding programs for trying to look at the minds and communications of the living world? I don't understand. And I think it's down to our communication and the way this field is seen.
Oh, yes. Okay, so here's, here's another neat thing. So that is Beth Goodwin with Europa, which is a wave glider, which is a sort of semi autonomous sea vehicle. Some of you might be familiar with them. They're like, basically there's a bit that floats on the surface with a solar panel on it and dangling underneath it, there's a sort of array that harvests energy from waves and it is able to drive itself through the sea, avoiding ships by itself with various recording devices on it. So Beth's one there had a hydrophone and some other devices and a camera, a couple of cameras on the deck, that took photos at intervals. I met her in 2019 in Hawaii on the Big Island. There it went on that wave glider, I think had been on a mission where it had piloted itself from Hawaii to Baja and back, listening for humpbacks and other marine life along the way. This mission… I think two days ago, this paper came out. I put the reference there and it went on a journey through the Hawaiian archipelago, including all of the submerged seamounts and other features, because all of the humpbacks, they hadn't been turning up in as great a number. And, so Mark Lammers and Beth and their fellow researchers wanted to see where the humpbacks were. This robot powered itself, listening by itself all the way through all these places in storms, recording day and night at equal interval all the time. This huge data set, it was too big a data set for Beth to listen back to all of it. So they had to use machine learning to comb it to listen out for the whales. And that map shows the distribution of whales recorded by this vessel's listening and also by some fixed position hydrophones that Mark had already put down in the archipelago. That is a enormously impressive thing to do. My first job after university, I went to work in a forest in Mauritius for the conservationist Carl Jones. My job was to listen out for endangered birds. I would wake up at four in the morning and I would go and sit under a tree and I would listen. And if within that tiny bit of forest, if I managed to listen to a very rare pigeon landing, I would write it down in a book. Then I would go back to a shed in the forest and I would write down in another book what I'd seen. Every few months, we'd copy the contents of that book into another book. When we were hit by a tropical cyclone, that book went into a big metal box in case it got destroyed. Then months and months later, somebody might put that information and send it back to the UK and to Durrell Zoo, and then it would be added into the sort of conservation knowledge store. That was me. That was 20 years ago or less or 18 years ago. This machine listens 24 hours a day in places people can't go under its own power and it sends the information back by itself, and then that information is combed through by other machines. It saves so much human time! It can do things that humans cannot do and that information is now shareable. It's not stuck in a book, in a box, in a tropical forest. And I think for me personally, the time saving opportunities of these tools are so, so impressive. And I think there's a popular misconception in case there's people here who don't know much about this, that sort of, if you use AI, it kind of does stuff for you. It's not these, it, the tools are only as good as the data sets that you apply them to and the choice of tool that you use. But the amount of human time that can be saved with the appropriate application of these analysis tools to data sets that work really with them is extremely powerful.
Here's one of Ari Friedlander's tags on the back of a humpback whale swimming through a bunch of jellyfish and sea lions. As a wildlife filmmaker, I find this absolutely astonishing also that I can see what it's like to be one of these animals. Again, these data sets are enormous. The camera that's doing this is essentially a waterproof and ruggedized cell phone. It's been developed because of that. So because of the developments in our cell phones, because these things, we drop them in toilets and because we want the batteries to last longer and we want to have different cameras to take recordings of our friends, that has driven the opportunity to get images like this that give you the perspective from a whale's world. So I think one thing to think about often is what human technologies are we driving now? What are our preconceptions in technology? What are the tools that we're developing to look at each other and find patterns in each other and record each other because they will be the next thing that we apply to the non human world. And I always think of the Robert Bones poem: Oh, what power the gift he give us to see ourselves as others see us”. In fact I've actually got a like a box in front of the middle of this poem. So it would frame many something and foolish notion. I can't actually see the word there. Which is very frustrating because this meeting is being recorded by the host bubble in the middle and I don't know how to get rid of it anyway. But I feel that another element of this, we've got all the machine analysis, we've got all these huge which helps us with these huge data sets. We've got this public engagement with the ubiquity of tool use. But we also have this opportunity to see ourselves from these animal perspectives or see these animals lives from their own perspectives. And that's a really rich and emotional and powerful tool and it's really important connection tool.
This is the project CETI ecosystem as some of you know about this is underway at the moment in Dominica. This is I think, I think Michael Bronstein, who's one of the machine learning people on this describes as industrial scale animal behavior information recording. So a lot of the machine learning or AI tools that have been applied to animal data sets have been retrospective. Biologists have gone out in the world and they've gathered loads of data and they kind of gathered it thinking about using the traditional statistical analysis techniques or how they would analyze it themselves. And now we've got these AI tools. A lot of them have thought, “okay, cool, let's see what these AI tools can make of our datasets”. But they haven't necessarily been optimized for those tools. The labeling hasn't been helpful. Perhaps there haven't been enough different kinds or the sort of large volumes of data sets that some of these machine learning tools are very powerful with, especially some of the speculative uses of natural language processing. These are tools that find patterns in human language. And trying to apply those tools to find patterns in the communications of other species requires really, really big, unprecedented data sets. So that's what CETI is doing now. They're rigging the C up with a sort of large array of hydrophones at different levels and lots of other sort of data capturing devices, including really sexy ones like soft robotic fish that swim among the whales, which I find kind of really fun, but also much probably more useful ones like static hydrophones and plugging that into the long term analysis of the population, by Shane Gerrard there. That's super interesting, but I think maybe not what we should talk about today. But that's the, that's, that's the sort of the bit that I think the general public probably finds really exciting too, because it holds this promise of potentially decoding animal communications. I think that is a really, really exciting way of getting people's attention to a much broader thing, which is pay attention to animals full stop. They are really interesting. I think Karen did a wonderful job of sort of explaining the array of animal communications and what we're seeing. But I think if we can succeed in bringing the attention from these kind of figurehead projects like this into a reconfiguration of our interest in animals in general and if we can link that into these public tools, that I think is what will be most potent. Sorry, I appreciate this as a bit kind of higgledy piggledy, but hopefully you can follow the train of thought.
This is a picture of a killer whale in Australia at the turn of the 20th century, taking part in a hunt with whalers in near a town called Eden. This is in Southeast Australia. The killer whales of this or orca of this part of the world were mammal hunting killer whales. They waited for migratory baleen whales coming up from the Antarctic or going down to the Antarctic along the coast of Australia and had been doing that for a long time. At some point they started teaming up with whalers who would also wait for these baleen whales to harvest their blubber and other products from them. This is a very interesting story because the killer whales here for many generations teamed up with the same family called the Davidsons, to cooperate in their hunting. The whales would come into the bay where the whalers lived and wake them up and get their attention, while other members of their pod would wait out at sea corralling the baleen whales. The whales that got the attention of the humans would then lead the humans out to sea where they would take part in the hunt. The humans would harpoon the baleen whales. Some of the killer whales would even. This is anecdotally even grab onto the ropes from the harpoons and pull the harpooned whales. There are in the museum there, there's the skull of one of the whales which they say has the teeth, the grooves in his teeth, which they say is from where he pulled on this rope. This was witnessed for like dozen. I mean, I think there are many photographs, lots of paintings and generations of accounts. And I watched videos with people who saw it, who died in the 1990s talking about it. This is to say that interspecies communication has been taking place for a long time. And we there the. It's quite ambivalent whether it's good or not. This is pretty impressive, humans and whales teaming up. The killer whales at the end of these hunts would be given the opportunity to eat the tongue of the killed whales before the whalers took it to shore. That was called the law of the tongue. So there was a sort of… It was a mutualistic symbiosis from the killer whale and human perspective, but not very good from the baleen whale perspective. And I think this photograph does quite a good job of both showing us that there is a long history of communication already between species. And of course, whales already have intraspecific and interspecific communications. Sorry cetaceans, but that like any new technology and any new interaction, there are always winners and losers. And so we should be extremely careful about how we proceed with our communications with other species because there might be a lot of unintended consequences or perhaps in the future we might see losers where we just saw a pretty good deal before. And this is a video that I made with Greta Thunberg. I thought this might be interesting to widen out. I've made a few films with Greta, she asked to make this one because this is something that she feels really strongly about, she… Oh, my God, I've just seen how long I've been talking. Please forgive me.
She feels that one of the major problems that people don't understand in our inability to grasp the systemic problems we have in climate and environmental crises is that we cannot see the links between ourselves and the natural world. That these links are being broken. But we also cannot perceive that they are broken. So she asked to make this film to try and explain the interlinkages between our crises and the core problem as she sees it, which is that our relationship with nature is broken. We cannot see ourselves as part of it. So I thought I'd just play you the beginning of this because this is where I think all of this work fits together.
Can you hear that? There's something I would like to talk about. “Our relationship with nature is broken. But relationships can change. The climate crisis, ecological crisis and health crisis. They are all interlinked. We no longer see the links between them. We only see this far. So what will we do? My name is Greta Thunberg and I would like to connect the dots because let's face it, if we don't change, we are f***** ”.
I'll just stop that there and excuse the swearing. I think that film wasn't a great film, as in from my perspective. I think I made the mistake of filling it with information. It was all statistics and facts. It was quite long.
The more I work in trying to get people's attention to the state of the natural world and the exciting things being discovered about them, the more important I real emotion is to people. We are primarily emotionally driven. As a scientist who started making films, I wanted to ignore that for a long time and essentially saw documentaries as PowerPoint opportunities with it that would move. I think we are failing in helping people connect. And the great promise, I think of things like CETI and of the other work that you're doing in this community is in helping to connect. But I feel I personally often get very wrapped up in how cool it is or the technology or exactly what is being discovered. But I think often we fall down on the most basic thing, which is finding the easiest way to connect this to the most people. I open it up now for discussion, but I'm sorry it went on for so long. When I estimated it, it was like half an hour. But this is like 20 minutes longer! Sorry.”
About the speaker
Paco Calvo is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Murcia, Spain, where he directs the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab). His research explores the intersection of plant behaviour, ecological psychology, and the philosophy of mind, with a focus on non-neural forms of cognition. He is one of the leading voices in the emerging field of plant intelligence, and the author of Planta Sapiens (2023, New York, WW Norton), an internationally acclaimed book that asks us to rethink what it means to think, and who gets to do it. The book has been translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, reflecting its global reach and impact. Paco’s work combines rigorous experimentation with conceptual analysis, pushing the boundaries of how we define cognition and sentience in living systems. He is particularly interested in the overall implications of de-centering the animal perspective, and in developing frameworks for interspecies understanding that go beyond anthropomorphic assumptions.
