Transcript 9 | “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.
Kate Armstrong
Fantastic. I don't think anybody is really complaining because it was absolutely fascinating and a fantastic perspective that I really think we haven't actually had in our conversations yet or before. And I think, Tom, your last minute kind of switch was very well, well received because I believe this is something that you're absolutely correct. It is really something that is important to this community. So, I think that's wonderful if you want to stop sharing your screen so you can just. I think you can… Oh yeah, there we go! Then we get everybody's wonderful faces and we did have some questions already populating the chat and I see that Vint has his hand up. So I think let's go for it and let's see what has come up during that wonderful talk.
Vinton G. Cerf
Hi, it's Vint. I'm one of the trustees of the Interspecies Internet organization and Tom, we really appreciate your passion and your last minute switch up. I'm actually extremely interested to know more about what you have discovered about whale communication and experienced yourself. The story about the orcas is quite interesting because it shows cooperation. It's not the first time we've seen this sort of cooperation. A number of lectures in the, in this series have shown interspecies cooperation for hunting or the bee birds that help you find bee hives and things like that, cooperating with humans. But I'd like to hear more from you about anything specific that you have uncovered about understanding communication with whales, if there is anything. So given the title of the original title of the talk.
Tom Mustill
Absolutely. And Vint, I do apologize to all of you because that's what the book is about and there is an awful lot. I did my last minute switch because I thought maybe it might have been covered before, especially if Diana Reiss is so… Because a lot of the work she's done and her colleagues. That case in, in Australia is very interesting because there's another facet to it which is that the whalers were Scottish colonists. But I don't know if you noticed in the photograph the many of the whalers that they employed were people the original inhabitants of the area, the Yuin people, Yuin nation. And they were an unusual family in paying a decent wage to people of an indigenous background there, and listening to them and taking their advice. The Yuin people had a pre-existing relationship with the orca that stretched back potentially thousands of years. The people who've been living there had been living there for 40,000 years. And studies of how much people had moved around have found that actually people have been in pretty much the same places for at least 10,000 years, potentially much longer because there's vocal histories there where they ask people, for instance. So, this is a bit of a digression but it's so cool! I want to tell you about it in oral history. The inhabitants of, of that part of Australia and other parts of Australia were asked to talk about how in their songs and stories the coastline used to be. These experiments were replicated in northen in Europe. And geologists and anthropologists teamed up to see whether the descriptions of how the coastline used to be before the last ice age change were accurate. And they were found to be extremely accurate. Where the water came to and what parts of the land were above and below the surface were described accurately and that information passed down accurately in their stories. And I think this is both very interesting as a way of dating how long people have been in a place, but also from the perspective of looking at animal communications and cultures, because we look at our written communications as being sort of more permanent. But if humans can describe things that accurately and pass it down for that many, I don't know, hundreds of generations, what could cetaceans be able to do? Relying on speaking to one another to navigate the world like. And, what information, how resilient could that those ways of being of transmitting information. And the flip side, the sort of horrible double edged rather to that is what could have been lost that we. That is kind of invisible to us. When we think of biodiversity loss and we think of populations of whales being removed but then recovering, we don't think about whether those cultures have recovered with them and those, those long term information stores and essentially wisdom have recovered with them. In terms of how whales communicate to each other. Oh my goodness! I'm not… This would take – you might have noticed that I talk a lot – It's hard to summarize it, but I mean in almost every area that you look at it, it is encouraging to think that we might be able. That whales might have complex communications and that we might be able to understand those communications they make. Their brains are big and complicated or at least. Sorry. These are generalizations. There's about 90 species of cetaceans, but they have. Looking at their brains, the structures of their brains and the organizations of them is encouraging. They have very, very sophisticated voices and very, very sophisticated hearing and they make a large variety of communications. They have highly social lives, some of them, and they have friendships and interactions between species and form long lasting interactions within species. These are all discoveries from individual cetacean species. So it won't be true for many of them, these things. Some whales are very interested in humans or other non-cetaceans. Humpback whales come to the rescue of other species, including giant ocean sunfish and seals and sea lions when they're being hunted. This is confusing, but some killer whales, are now attacking sail ships off the coast of Gibraltar and disabling their rudders. Other ones, orcas in the Pacific Northwest had a craze for wearing salmon as hats. They are, you know, some of them seem to kill for no reason other than to play or not even for practice killing. It just seems like it's interesting. So you have these other ones raped. They are enormously varied in their behaviors. They show signs, some of them of mourning. Others seem to get high and inebriate themselves. Others seem to bring gifts. When you try and record and characterize the vocalizations that they make that we know are really important to them, we see an enormous complexity that increases with our ability to record it.
We are very hamstrung by being air breathing, visually focused animals in understanding how it can be to live with sound as your primary mode of communication. But, you know, I'm sure you'll be familiar with signature whistles which are thought to be analogous to names. It now seems that there might be sort of names or of individual groups of dolphins or killer whales that some overlapping populations of sperm whales, even though they look identical to us, do not interact with each other, do not act in the same way and are essentially different kind of clans. And the thing that delineates those clans is how they speak. They sound different and they communicate differently. So they've got big brains, they've been around a lot. They're highly social, they are really communicative. The communications are really important to themselves. When we look at the communications, we find really complex things, their behaviors. We don't really understand most of what they're doing at all. And sometimes they're interested in us and sometimes they're interested in each other. Those would be really good characteristics if you found an alien for thinking that you might be able to find some kind of communication that's interesting going on and maybe to communicate with them too. If they had no interest in us, their brains were very, very different. Their life challenges were very, very different. They weren't really sociable. They didn't communicate in a way that we could see or measure. We'd be stuck. But with whales with cetaceans, many of those things aren't true. But the big problem is they live in the sea. It's really hard recording them in the sea and trying to link those communications into a behavioral context. And I think that's where CETI and those other projects are trying to get giant data sets of communication. Say… if you could listen to a sperm whale baby learning to talk over its lifetime. If you could understand what sound one of them was making and then who replied, or if there was chorusing and who those individuals were and what else was going on, what the sea state was, whether they were hungry, whether there are any predators around and what happened next time and whether that was across the whole population, you can then start to build models and start to test those models, because if you can, if you're recording constantly and you're at sort of here's point A and you're at point B in time and you've just heard something going on, you can have an argument in your team over what the meaning is and whether it's what's going to happen next. But because you're recording constantly, you can see what happens next and test your hypothesis and you can discount ways of like the ways in that we think we might have to how they're acting. That's another rambly all over the place answer, but I hope it gave a bit of a flavour of it.
Kate Armstrong
Thumbs up from Vint. Thanks, Tom. Con, did you want to make the next comment? You have your hand up there, Tom.
Con Slobodchikoff
You mentioned that we spend vast quantities of money on various physics projects, astronomy projects. We spend relatively little money on studying animal communication or even animal behavior. And I submit that with animal communication, it's a problem of culture in the sense that many humans like to believe that there's a vast gulf between us humans and then the rest of the animals. And, as we start approaching breaking down those barriers, such as looking at cognition in animals, such as looking at communication, where it verges on animal language, something that I've been pushing, we start to get to the point where these barriers start to break down and people resent that. They don't really want to admit that in many circles it is not fashionable to talk about animal language. And I submit, again, that's because of the cultural differences that we have. So, I think that one solution is to educate not so much scientists who might have hardened their position, but the general public in ways that don't necessarily show that animals are different. Look at all the differences that bats have, you know, look at all the differences that dolphins have, but in ways that show that the animals are similar to us. Because, in my experience, when I've been talking to people among the general public, when I talk about the similarities that I find with people, they start to empathize with animals, in general. And so I think that having films, having popular articles, having talks that show the similarities of the cognitive capacities of animals, of the communication capacities of animals to humans. I think will go a long way towards eventually breaking down that cultural prejudice that we have against studying communication in animals, cognition in animals, and animal behavior in general. So that's my $0.02 worth, I think.
Tom Mustill
I think you're bang on the money, Con. It's really nice to see you as well. I have only ever emailed you, so it's lovely to see your face. I think, and thank you for your work. I think it's, it's just so. I've got a. Since I read your book, there's a squirrel that lives in my back garden. And I now watch it more than I watch the birds that come to my back garden. But even me, a conservation biologist, zoologist, who's really interested in animal communication, dismissed the squirrels because of my culture, because everybody dismisses the squirrels around here. And, I find this battle within me, which must be the same or similar to many people's battles of the culture we've grown up in and these kind of many competing uneven things. What we should eat, how we should think. I think the route into people is pets, or at least for most people.
Many people already believe they can understand or intuit what their pets are thinking and feeling, or that they have rich inner worlds and communications. But we're so pulled away from an experience, a wider experience of the natural world often that we don't extend that sort of compassionate view to animals that we don't get to spend much time with or get to observe very clearly. I think this culture is changing, but it's really kind of unequal. And I was actually, I was talking to Diana about this, like, about this sort of, this shift that, you know, that's been happening from the sort of anthropomorphism, resistance or over resistance for reaching for human like qualities in animals. So, where you've had sort of just so stories and Dr. Dolittle and sort of childish ways, or what is seen as childish ways of looking at animals as being kind of… They're either just like humans, which is patently wrong, or they're nothing. They're just, they're just mindless biological automatons. And, I think we're entering a richer and more interesting period where it is percolating into our culture that they talk, but it doesn't have to be validated by how closely to our way of talking it is. And they think that it's not on a scale of how good it is, but based on how much they think like us and, and they feel. And, also maybe because in wildlife films we lean heavily on anthropomorphism while pretending not to. You know, like you'll have. The narrator will never sit and say. You know, this fox is really sad because it's lost its prey item. But they'll play sad music and they'll get a shot of its head down and the color scheme will grow gray. So that for me it's quite interesting when you watch natural history films, that shows our kind of internal squeamishness and battle, like, should we relate to them? But maybe that's not scientific. And I think hopefully we're putting that a bit behind us by just thinking like it doesn't really matter how they square up to our particular abilities or assumptions about them. We know that they communicate, and think, and feel. But how is it similar and how is it different? And both of those are really intriguing. Yeah, that's my hope. And I think in a way, if we can just put the sort of anthropomorphism or not thing to bed, it would be great, wouldn't it? Because, I feel we get sort of so knocked down by just trying to decide whether it's wrong headed or not to have thoughts about animals thinking. Whereas the world is so much more nuanced and interesting and complicated. If you're just curious, like again, in nature films, the voice of God always knows what's going on. Right? I feel that's such a travesty! Like how the narrator always pretends that they know exactly what's happening that year. You know, if that fox doesn't eat that rabbit, it will die. No biologist who studied foxes or rabbits knows that for sure. They have hypotheses and they will argue with their peers who have different hypotheses. But why in our storytelling around it, do we kind of make it seem so questionless and uncurious and uninteresting? So, I just think we need to increase the amount of questioning and stop trying to take angry positions about what we believe. And that would be more fun. And you've been great in helping that I should add.
Con Slobodchikoff
Thank you.
Kate Armstrong
Diana, would you like to.
Diana Reiss
I just want to make a brief comment. First of all, Tom, thank you for a really fascinating, wonderful talk.
I think it was right on for the group. I just want to comment that I really agree with what you're saying. And I also just want to stress that I think the media and filmmakers documentary makers like you, really, we can partner in so many ways to get these kinds of messages out for so long. I know when I first started, most of my colleagues didn't want to talk to the press. And it was like, just focus on your research. Don't go into advocacy. Don't do translational kinds of things, because it will take away from your science. And I know so many of us, and many of us in this group and other colleagues really feel that it's our responsibility to get these messages out, to translate the science that we're learning. I mean, we have the privilege and the honor to work with these animals. And how can we not give voice? And I know with interspecies communication, I think that's one of our goals, to find a way to discover their voices, to decode, either studying their own forms of communication or finding interfaces that will help us understand. And I think it's partnering with filmmakers like you and others that really help us get those messages out. Because you can help shape. I mean, often, you know, we struggle with what's a powerful way to get that message out. And I loved what you were talking about, about personalizing it, showing that bat, you know, in a way that people can relate to. It's not some weird thing that we have to be afraid of, you know, when we're out there. And I'll never forget, I'll just finish with this because I don't want to take more time here. But I remember we did a National Geographic many years ago, was doing a story about animals and their cognitive abilities. This was quite a while ago, and they told us that one of the most embraced story was when they did animal portraits. It wasn't the factoids, it was showing the whole face of an animal that we could relate to. It was like showing who they are. And I think for us, as we learn more about what they're about, we see them as whos. And how do we share that? So I thank you so much for bringing this. This to this group today. It was. It was really inspiring. Thank you.
Tom Mustill
Thank you. I think, I think I was thinking earlier that if the work of some of the animal translation initiatives pays off, there's going to be a really embarrassing period where people start running old nature documentaries through computer analysis software where they're going to highlight that not only are the animals saying things that make no sense for the narrative that's being told in the story, that they're not even the same animals at all. And they might have been filmed like hundreds of miles apart. Or that the sounds of the birds singing in the documentary about Costa Rica is like an African, you know, like, you know, bee eater or something like that. It's going to be horrendous for wildlife filmmakers showing up. What a shoddy job we've done of actually representing which voices are there and what they're saying.
Kate Armstrong
Pen, go ahead. On that very humorous note, would you like to make your comment question?
Kevin Rinaldo
Yes, thank you for your talk, Tom, and sorry I came in a bit late, but in human communications we often find that. That you could say a phrase, I love you or I love you, and the tonal quality, the body languages, the relationship of tone to body language carry very different meanings. My question is in the project CETI, if you're aware that they're actually looking at the tonal qualities of what is being said versus only, let's say, the utterances themselves.
Tom Mustill
That's a really good question. I actually use that exact example in my book as well. And obviously, like, it's not just the tonal qualities, it's multimodal outside of your vocal communication. It's like what your body language is doing or what the other modes of communication you potentially have at your disposal. And then the context of that “I love you”. It also is enormously important to the information being transmitted, what has happened before or afterwards and who the two actors involved, if there are two in that are, and if anybody's overhearing them or able to overhear them. All I know about CETI is that they are trying to record as much different data as they possibly can to allow questions like these to be posed. I don't know how you can… I don't know anything about the tones of sperm whale clicks. I'm not sure if they have a tonal element. I know that they are… So, I don't know. But I would really be surprised if there was an element of the vocalization made by the whales in those click trains decoders that they're not trying to capture. But I think in terms of like, as to the wider idea that you can say something and if it was written down, it would boldly mean one thing. They are trying to find context and other modes to place those communications within. But almost certainly they will discover that they are not recording all the right stuff and there's bits that they haven't learned about or don't know about that have to address. I do know that there will be more to come from them relatively soon that they've just been getting going, but I think in the relatively near future you'll be able to hear some updates from them.
Kevin Rinaldo
Thank you.
Kate Armstrong
Thanks Kevin. Colin, would you like to go next? We have you next.
Colin Mutchler
Sure, yeah. Thanks Tom, so much and thanks everybody. I was able to listen to the Karen Bakker one last time and I'm new to the community but very, very excited about all that is happening here. So I would say I probably sit somewhere in that world that Tom's into. Like the passion and purpose of my work over the years has been in the same kind of like how to communicate about things that are important and how to, to enroll the public to understand. So fascinated and excited. The question I wanted to ask you, Tom, is given the increased recording and understanding of animal experiences and also these new immersive technologies that are starting to emerge. Do you know of any examples of people who are trying to give humans the ability to actually experience more of what animals experience? Like imagining a virtual reality experience where you, you are flying like a bird, or… You know, I'm sure many people have had these kinds of thoughts, but it seems like it's becoming more possible now than it ever has been before. And given your work, I figured you probably have. You probably know about some of these examples. I'd love to hear about them.
Tom Mustill
Yes, absolutely. I mean that in, in like the sort of most basic way. There's been a craze in the UK for in slow tv. I don't know if it happens on your side of the pond where you'll just watch like a… It started off with like I think a camera fixed to a reindeer Christmas postal delivery service in Lapland. And then they started doing, and it was so successful, people would just watch an hour from the back of this post delivery thing that they would watch cameras placed. When I was at the Natural History unit in Bristol, which is the wildlife production unit of the BBC, placing cameras in the backs of sea turtles to just experience a day in their life. And the BBC Earth team, which is the sort of wider including digital side, we're doing a lot of work with VR just with traditional camera VR so you would just be by streams with whale, with grizzly bears hunting salmon. But I think slightly cooler than that. I would check out, there's a company called Marshmallow Laser Feast and they're friends of mine in London and they try to capture the umwelt, the experiential world of another species which you know, some feel is impossible, but they give it a try. And, so for instance they did a project called in the “Eyes of an Animal”. And in the “Eyes of an Animal”, they lidar scanned a forest. So they had a sort of navigation, navigable 3D map of this forest. And then they flipped between the perspectives of four different animals within a food chain. So a mosquito, and then a dragonfly, and then a frog, and then an owl. So, the mosquito would sense carbon monoxide and it had a temperature sensing and the owl had a sort of different field of vision than we have. I can't remember the other. Obviously the compound eyes, the dragonfly made it very different. And so they in VR, because they didn't have to become photo real, so you wouldn't see like joins or stitches in the imagery and your brain would fill in the gaps. It was wonderful. And they've done a lot of the same work with trees and now they're doing with fungal mycorrhizae, trying to give you the feeling of being distributed beneath the soil. They're great. And there's, I think, quite a lot of other people trying to get across these feelings of helping us to get closer to imagining in our limited human way what other ways of being might be like.
Colin Mutchler
Thank you.
Kate Armstrong
Thanks, Colin. Dove, would you like to go next?
Dove
Thank you! Thank you, Tom, for speaking today. And it's lovely to participate, be a part of this Internet community. I saw Tom speak at, well, virtually at the Explorer Club. I'm an explorer club in the interspecies communication of dolphins and I got nominated in when some members discovered some of my work. And I love the fact that you're talking about: for us to care about conservation, for us to care about the connection we have to have that emotional link. And I'm trying to do in my dolphin talks and some new discoveries of working with them out in the wild for the past 40 years. I mean, I started when I was a child and I met a beluga whale and it was through. Actually, you had Roger Payne briefly at your talk, who he would be so fun to invite in this platform because of the years, you know, just with one whale song, he really changed a lot of people's minds, especially in the UK with him amplifying it. Here in Maui, close to where I live, there's a 3D surround sound, an answer to Colin's question, an immersive experience where you can go in and experience the humpback whales. So they created a experiential base in the water with the Humpback experience and this dome theater. And I think more… I know CETI is probably the first one to get, you know, millions of dollars in funding to do kind of what we spend, you know, millions in space exploration looking for aliens or other life. But like Sylvia Earle has said, we've only explored 5% of the ocean, but the ocean covers most of our planet, right? The water system. So, I think creating these bridges, creating a community that communicates and connects, I guess for me it's really reaching people through media, through picture talking. It's our oldest form of communication, kind of what we're doing here, but we're doing it on Internet to kind of get people to realize there's other worlds happening and that we're connected to them. I, for me, when I think about CETI, I think about. Are they recording? So we hear an audible communication from a whale or a dolphin, cetacean and the sperm whale. But then there's the whole vast of communication that they're communicating on beyond our audible ear. And how are they recording that to kind of go into the system of communication, do you know?
Tom Mustill
Well, there's a lot of questions in there and I guess I'll try and sort of throw. There was a thing that struck me just while you were talking, which I thought could link quite a lot of the points that were made with what you were talking about and passion and picture talking, but also how to draw people's attention to this field in general. I think one reason that it's hard to get gigantic funding grants is that it's such a distributed and confusing seeming field for outsiders, and it's hard to see how to resource and what to resource. And I think what you're doing here in terms of bringing this community together, I think that might be the key. Like if there was to be a human genome project for animal communication in the sea, or animal communication more generally, or a CERN for that, how would you? The advantage of those things are that they have multiple researchers and in different research institutes. So you, you make it interdisciplinary and international and you have public stakeholders and national governments funding them because they're considered to be matters of national importance. And then I think you could bring ethics into it and have public consultations on how should we be going about listening to other lives and how should we be going about talking back if we decide to do so. Those things, I think would be of such tremendous interest that you would generate a huge amount of press and publicity and stories and films. But you would also make it come towards a sort of central endeavor, but that also doesn't rely on one project working or not working. So you make it…
Dove
A think tank? And then we make decisions from that.
Tom Mustill
Well, I mean, I mean perhaps a think tank, but perhaps something with, with like where you try and develop tools centrally like CERN and the Human Genome Project. They, work endeavors with fixed technological objectives and shared outcomes that could then be like shared with other researchers afterwards. So I think if you were to like, what are the bottlenecks of the whole field? What are the general purpose tools that need to be developed that all researchers would find useful and then depending on how they apply them, that would proliferate the number of stories that could be told and the number of connections made. I feel like that sort of thing would be really, really helpful because having researched this for a few years and even with a biological background, it is intimidatingly and complicated – it involves so many different things from cognition to physics to linguistics. It's really hard to find a way in if you're not an expert. And so how do you simplify a way of making this relevant internationally in a way that makes people care about it, but also feel they can understand it? CERN has done such a good job on it because, I mean, for me I find CERN boring. I mean, I think it looks like a cool tunnel, but none of it's affected my life as far as I can see. And it's quite cool when they talk about it. This stuff is so much more interesting! Why isn't there a CERN level of funding going to trying to understand the, the communications of other species? I think it's because it hasn't been been framed or the various agents haven't come together in a way that helps things be distributed among them. And there is a human side to that, which I'm very familiar with from film, which is there's a tribalism, there's a need to own one's own data sets and not share them, which comes from the funding systems in science, which is really, you know, hobbling if you want to make progress as a field, if you're working in closed silos. Also, I should just say there was a question in the comments which somebody said they live in Bournemouth. Hello, fellow English person or English living person. We're doing a whale event in Brighton on 9th of February with the Sussex Dolphin Project. So the, the experts on the dolphins of the south coast of the UK will be giving a talk in a, in a Church in Brighton on 9 February for the World Cetacean Society. So for that Lisa Wetton, come along. I'll be there. That's how you get to know about those dolphins. Was that helpful?
Dove
Yeah. Did you see “My Octopus Teacher”? Because, like a movie like that, you know, when we have an emotional story, then it connects to conservation. So for us to be sharing kind of our work together in a group, we could probably, you know, really. I haven't been had the opportunity yet to do a dolphin talk at the Explorer Club and to share my empirical evidence. Over a number of years, working with them in the wild, meeting with them, you know, with, like, dolphins meeting with, you know, humpback whales here, you know, having a mom and baby swim right up to me, you know, within inches of my body and have this connection. I, you know, I haven't had, like, a film crew following me around, like “My Octopus Teacher”, but I can convey the stories and some of the things that I've experienced with them in relationship to how humans live and, like, bring some of their games and some of what I've learned from them and how we relate. So I think the more we have what we have in common with animal species, especially cetaceans, the more we'll feel like, oh, my gosh, this is my relative in the ocean and we need to do our best to take care of them. So, it seems like communication always will lead to conservation – let's hope!
Speaker 2 1:20:20
Well, Octopus Teacher is very interesting because it's a very powerfully effective conservation film that never says conservation or even mentions a threat to the environment, which I think is quite an interesting lesson if you want to persuade people to save things by bashing them over their head with how much they're being trashed, which includes me. That's what I've done lots of. So I found that a very interesting lesson there.
Kate Armstrong
In the interest of time, maybe we can just go to David quickly. I think this is our last comment. I don't know, Diana, if you had another comment as well. No. Okay, so we have lots of different comments in the chat and we can send that chat around if everybody would like that after the talk. But, David, if you'd like to be.
David Rothenberg
Our final question, thanks so much. Thanks so much, Tom, for writing this great book and for really finding a way that this amazing experience you had could be turned into such a large, extended project. I think many people have these encounters with whales and dolphins and they touch, are touched by. They don't know what to do. Next you figured out what to do and that's very impressive. Now, with your vast experience in the media making nature films, I had one specific question. You know, many people have made films about humpback whales because they're so beautiful and their song really inspires people. But pretty much every film I've seen doesn't actually play the music for more than a few seconds before adding synthesizers, orchestras, human interventions. It's as if they're afraid to really show what these whales are doing that really touches people. Do you think that, you know, am I wrong here? Do you think the media is afraid of the subject matter of nature in a way to really present it in as deep a way as it could? Or maybe you have suggestions for those of us working on projects like this. What should we try to avoid? What should we try to do to get the message across, to investigate the subject in as deep a way as possible?
Tom Mustill
Well, thank you that's really kind. It's really a hard question, like, because in the field of. I feel that wildlife filmmaking is quite boring because of the financial pressures on wildlife film as an industry, which is to make really entertaining, reassuring, spectacular films that don't challenge the viewer too much, that will not turn the streamers/audiences away from watching the next episode, and that don't have anything linked to particular places or views or people so they can be as internationally marketed as possible. Those are not… That's not a great framework for artistic creativity and a diversity of attempts to flourish. So, I think, you know, so many people are bored of the wallpaper music pasted over the sounds of the natural world in wildlife films, or even the fact that even if music is going to be played, that it's always the same kind of Hans Zimmery kind of stuff, you know, like, why does a meerkat get Hans Zimmer and not like death metal? You know, there's no reason. No one's asked them, they haven't gotten voiced an opinion. But that's what the audience expects. I made a film about the sea where I put some music into it. And on the Facebook comments, some people said: “I love this film, but I hated the music because that was the wrong music for the sea”. And I thought, how interesting. You have a view that the sea has the correct. There's a correct music. But obviously our experiences are so varied and our musical experiences interweave with them. So we have different expectations of how to represent natural things. And so I think, how do you play with this, I don't know. Personally, I want to try and make, like, an enormously iconoclastic wildlife film that is not like any other wildlife films, that kind of breaks all these rules, where the voice of God has no idea what's going on, where there's no Hans Zimmery kind of music or some sections with no music, and some sections where it's really intrusive and just kind of tear it all up. But I don't think it will be very commercially successful or maybe even not funded in the first place. So I have no idea how to, you know, within your world of. Of creating music or allowing opportunities for the reception of it. Maybe just where that idea, maybe that that idea should be the USP that you approach people with and say, you know what? This stuff is already amazing, but you've been kind of ruining it. But now we have the opportunity to let people properly appreciate it, and maybe people will bite to that. But my instinct is that it's not in the field of wildlife film, because the structures of the machine that makes wildlife film aren't really interested in that. I think it might be in other documentary that is like. And in live events, which I guess is what you've been doing. So I don't know what to suggest unless we tear down the entire infrastructure of wildlife film and build it again. And the only way I can think of doing that is by showing that other things work. And the only way you can ever show that other things work is with a really low budget as a risky thing outside. And then the big guys notice that it works and you've risked it, and then they copy you and they get all the credit. So, like that in creative. So, you basically, you're an outsider experimenting or your insider raking it in, but you can't really be both, in my experience.
Kate Armstrongs
Wonderful. Diana, would you like to make a final, final comment on this before we start to wrap it up?
Diana Reiss
Well, I'm going to channel Roger Payne here for a moment. Okay. I just got off the phone with Roger before we started this meeting, and he was hoping to be with us today. He couldn't be, but, you know, Roger's name's been mentioned several times. And obviously, for those of you who don't know, he was the one. He and his colleagues first discovered humpback whale songs that we've been talking about, these hauntingly beautiful songs that speak to us and Roger. At a meeting we had at the Explorers Club several months ago, Roger was on by video and he said, you know, what we need to do is make people will fall in love with the whales and other animals. And I think that's what I was hearing from you today, Tom. You know, the idea of let's share our science in ways that we fall in love and feel empathy for these animals. So, Roger wanted me to convey that message today to all of you and say “hello”. And again, I just wanted to say thank you so much, all of you, for joining us. Tom, thank you for just a brilliant talk that I think spoke to our hearts and our minds as well. So thanks, everybody.
Kate Armstrongs
Thank you, Diana. I think that wraps it up absolutely perfectly for today. And I think we're all going away with something that we maybe weren't expecting today, that that is this renewed kind of enthusiasm for why we are here in this room. That is this emotional connection to the world around us and curiosity to know more through, through our human spirit and, and that of the animals. So, thank you so much for this, this amazing talk which garnered so much discussion. Tom, I think that was a wonderful final pivot. Very well received and thank you everybody for your inputs. It's again, another very successful and fruitful session. We will have our next session happening in one month's time, so keep your eyes on your inboxes for information about that session. And yeah, we look forward to welcoming you again and have a wonderful weekend. Thank you very much for joining us.
