Cetacean communication, animal cognition, and AI-meets-biology research — synthesized weekly. Opinionated, philosophically grounded, and honest about what the science actually shows.
Free to read · $8/month for the full archive · Unsubscribe anytime
Google's DolphinGemma model made headlines in April. Most of them were wrong in the same direction: they treated "AI can now classify dolphin whistles with high accuracy" as though it were one step away from real-time translation. It isn't, and the gap matters more than the achievement.
Read issueEach bottlenose dolphin develops a unique whistle in its first year and uses it as a self-identifier throughout its life. Other dolphins copy it when addressing them. This seemingly simple behavior requires an extraordinary cascade of cognitive abilities — self-awareness, theory of mind, symbolic abstraction — that we're still working out how to measure.
Read issueThe ethical framework for interspecies communication research has never been systematically built. We have marine mammal welfare guidelines, animal cognition protocols, and general research ethics — but nothing that addresses what happens when the animal can, in some meaningful sense, respond to your questions.
Read issueReleased by Google in collaboration with the Georgia Tech Research Institute and the Wild Dolphin Project, DolphinGemma is a transformer-based model fine-tuned on bottlenose dolphin vocalizations. It classifies whistle contours, identifies call types, and models temporal patterns in vocal sequences with a degree of precision that was previously impossible without significant compute investment.
What it doesn't do: translate. The jump from "we can classify sounds with high accuracy" to "we understand what dolphins are communicating" is enormous and largely unsolved. DolphinGemma is a measurement instrument, not a decoder. The newsletter covers this distinction carefully because the coverage almost never does.
As a documentary filmmaker working on a film about DolphinGemma's development, I have access to the researchers, the methodology, and the data that doesn't make the press releases. That context informs every issue.
Research archive →Acoustics
Interactive spectrograms of bottlenose dolphin calls. Signature whistles, burst-pulse sequences, echolocation click trains. See the frequency structure that AI models are trained on.
Open visualizerAudio
Recordings of real dolphin vocalizations — signature whistles, echolocation, mother-calf contact calls, burst-pulse social sounds. With annotations on context and species.
Browse recordingsReference
Plain-English definitions of key terms — signature whistle, DolphinGemma, bioacoustics, umwelt — plus 20 annotated books on cetacean communication and animal cognition.
Glossary Reading listWeekly · Free to read · $8/month for the full archive
Unsubscribe anytime. No spam.