I’ve been reading “How to Speak Whale” by Tom Mustill, and it is astonishing in many ways. Overall, it illustrates the fact that, whatever topic you’re interested in, the number of researchers investigating that topic and the amount of new evidence they are producing (and publishing) is growing exponentially. That’s both bad news and good news. The bad news: everything I knew about animal communication and about research on animal communication just a year ago is obsolete. Forget about catching up or keeping up. The good news: if you have access to “big data” (huge data sets and the computer power to process them) you can answer questions that were impossible even to ask as recently as ten years ago. And – something I vaguely knew that Mustill relates in some detail – “big data,” using advanced artificial intelligence learning systems fed by miniaturized observation instruments, is rapidly filling in what we know about the complex social lives and communication behavior of cetacians – and many other animal groups.
I won’t even try to summarize all I have learned from this book. The citations in the end-notes will keep my reading list overflowing for the rest of my sabbatical. By then much of it will be already obsolete, and I’ll need to refresh it as well as I can.
“How to Speak Whale”: Highly recommended.
