The Mystery of Sea Creatures (3/5): Could an orca give a TED Talk? | Karen Bakker

**Elise Hu** (0:00)
It is summer where I live, and luckily, I live near the Pacific Ocean. As the weather continues to heat up, I'm spending more time at the beach. It always makes me wonder, what's going on under the water? From the deep sea to the shoreline, the ocean is teeming with creatures that are stranger, smarter and more surprising than most of us could ever dream up. For July's TED Talks Daily playlist, we have gathered five of our favorite talks that dive into the awe-inspiring and occasionally mind-bending creatures from orcas to kinky fish that live beneath the waves. Happy listening.
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We're about to learn some of the sounds in nature that we can't hear with human ears. But as conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker reveals in her TED 2023 talk, AI is now helping us decode the language of nature, and it's deepening our understanding and connection to other creatures. After the break.
And now, our TED Talk of the day.

**Karen Bakker** (1:19)
So we're in the middle of a fierce debate about how artificial intelligence will change human society. But have you thought about how AI will transform your relationship to the non-human world? I've spent years studying how scientists use devices like this, combined with AI, to listen to the hidden sounds of nature and decode non-human communication. Hidden sounds, because much acoustic communication in nature occurs in the high ultrasound, above your hearing range or in the deep infrasound, below your hearing range. So I'm going to play a sound. I want you to listen and try to guess who or what this is.
So that was a bat. That was bat ultrasound, recorded above your hearing range, but slowed down so you could hear. So that was an advertisement call from the peak of the mating season. Scientists can decode these calls. So a sample bat-to-English translation would be, and I quote, Pay attention. I'm a Pippus trellis, Natusi bat, specifically male. My name is X, I am landing here, and we share a common social identity and common communication pool. For a pick-up line by a bat, not bad.
So scientists have recorded millions of bat vocalizations like this, and they've decoded many of them using AI. And they've revealed that bats have dialects that they pass down from one generation to the next, and that baby bats learn to speak just like you did by listening to the adults around them and babbling back until they speak adult bat. So bats have far more complex communication than we knew, and they're only one of many examples. Listen to this.
So those are orcas who live right here in the Salish Sea. Scientists can decode individual orca calls using AI, and they've revealed that orcas also pass down their dialects from one generation to the next. So it turns out that orcas and bats are not the only creatures that make ultrasound. Moths, mice, beetles, rats. At the other end, in the deep infrasound, elephants and whales, tigers and some birds make sound. So when we first learn about these secret sounds of the world, we're often surprised because humans tend to believe that what we cannot perceive does not exist. And so we miss a lot. One of my favorite examples is this peacock. This peacock is also making very loud infrasound with its tail, which you cannot hear, but female peahens can, and it is an important factor in their mating decisions. So this peacock is giving a rock concert.
Now, we have lived with peacocks for millennia, but we only just figured this out. Scientists also used to think that turtles were voiceless, and mother turtles abandoned their nests after laying their eggs. But we've just discovered that baby Amazonian turtles communicate through their shells before they hatch to coordinate the moment of their birth and then follow their mother's calls to safety in the water.
Even creatures without ears are exquisitely sensitive to sound. When coral larvae are born, usually at a mass spawning event, a few days after the full moon, they wash out to sea. So scientists used to think that these little larvae were helpless, randomly pushed around by wind and waves and currents. But it turns out that coral larvae are acoustically attuned. They can hear the sounds of healthy reefs. They can hear the sound of their home reef, their mother reef, and they swim back home across miles of open ocean. So these are tiny creatures with no central nervous system. But we think they do that with these hairs that you see on the outside of their bodies. They're a lot like the hairs inside your ears that are enabling you to listen to me right now, so you can think of a coral larva a little bit like an inside-out ear, except that its sense of hearing is profoundly more sensitive than your own because they hear with their entire bodies. Even our planet makes sound. Volcanoes, earthquakes, sounds so low and strong and powerful, they travel very far, passing through soil and stone and even solid walls. Listen to this hydrothermal vent deep under the ocean.