Why animals talk…and can we translate what they say?

Why animals talk…and can we translate what they say?

Speaker: Dr Arik Kershenbaum (Associate Professor and Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge)

When: 1pm on Thursday 16 July 2026

Venue: Sainsbury Laboratory, 47 Bateman Street, Cambridge CB2 1LR

Online attendance: Join remotely via Zoom

Talk Details

All animals – and many plants – communicate, but some have more to say than others. That difference is driven by evolutionary pressures; complex communication is going to arise in those species where complex social interactions mean that there is an adaptive advantage to communicating larger amounts of information. Rather than attempting to view animal communication as a parallel of human language, it is important to start by understanding the adaptive needs of different species and from there to investigate just how much they do or don’t have to say. With much interest recently in the possibility of using new AI techniques to “translate” animal communication, it is essential first to understand what animals are saying by considering what they actually need to say. In this talk, I will explore some of the questions about information content and information encoding in animals, and challenge the idea that the concept of “meaning”, as we understand it from our own experience, cannot be directly applied to animals, who likely perceive meaning in a very different way to a linguistic species such as ourselves. I will illustrate this by looking at the possible significance (or lack of it) of concepts such as “complexity” that have been traditionally used to search for language in animals. I will also consider how our understanding of meaning can be applied in cases where communicative signals are fundamentally graded, such as in dolphins and wolves.

Speaker background

Dr Arik Kershenbaum

Associate Professor and Fellow of Girton College, University of Cambridge

Dr Kershenbaum is a zoologist that specialises in animal vocal communication. He works in the field with wolves and their relatives, with gibbons, dolphins, hyraxes and many other species. His research is focused both on understanding the information content of animal calls, and on applying this knowledge to conservation challenges. He has written two popular science books, “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy”, and recently, “Why Animals Talk”, for which he received the Max Planck Group Science Communication Medal. Dr Kershenbaum studied for his undergraduate degree at Cambridge, received a PhD from the University of Haifa in Israel, and then after a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis in Tennessee, returned to Cambridge, where he received an ScD, and is currently a College Teaching Officer at Girton College.

Bioacoustics Research Group

Dr Arik Kershenbaum's University of Cambridge profile