Bonus: Shane Gero on sperm whales communication

People make words out of speech sounds so that we can understand each other. This ability to communicate using meaningless symbols that make sense when put together is called the duality of patterning. It is an important difference between our communication system and that of other animals. Shane Gero is a whale biologist who has been studying sperm whale vocalisations with a team. They have published a paper that raises the possibility that duality of patterning may exist in sperm whales. Ilya Kolmanovsky spoke to Shane Gero about working on the study, the way sperm whales communicate with each other, and the role of AI in exploring all this. You may also listen to this episode in the closed Telegram channel of the Libo/Libo studio: https://cutt.ly/gol03botg