Think you can decipher the rhythmic clicks and whistles of dolphins or the grunts and alarm calls of monkeys? A foundation is offering big prizes for progress in communicating with animals.
Looking to prompt renewed efforts at decoding animal communication, a non-profit founded by an investor and a university are offering prizes — including a hefty $10 million — to teams that can figure out what animals are “saying.”
Entrants aren’t asked to come up with a Star Trek-like “universal translator” for animals. Rather, the people behind the Coller Dolittle Challenge want to see methods that allow for two-way communication between humans and individual species.
“We are open to any organism and any modality from acoustic communication in whales to chemical communication in worms,” said Yossi Yovel, a professor at Tel Aviv University and co-chairman of the challenge.
The grand prize is a $10 million grant or $500,000 in cash, chosen by the winner, while the Foundation will offer $100,000 prizes each year for the best entries that make significant progress toward communicating with animals. The yearly prizes will be assessed “for significant contributions to decipher, interface or mimic non-human organism communication.”
While it may seem far-fetched — and there are those who believe humans will never be able to fully understand animal communication in proper context — there have been efforts to communicate with and decode the communications of bats, dolphins, whales and some primate species. Scientists have also pushed the boundaries on understanding group communication, such as the coordination involved in avian murmurations.
Orangutans have demonstrated the ability to understand abstract concepts, like using money, rudimentary sign language, and have even deceived humans. One orangutan in the 1960s repeatedly escaped his zoo enclosure by hiding a small strip of metal in his mouth and using it to pick a lock. Credit: Klub Boks/Pexels
The organizers believe artificial intelligence will be the tool that ultimately helps crack the communication barrier, but entrants aren’t required to use AI. The technology is incredibly useful for tasks involving pattern recognition and sorting large amounts of data, both of which are important in this kind of work when researchers are tasked with analyzing thousands of audio samples or hundreds of hours of footage.
Alas, we don’t think the foundation will be interested in the Buddinese language, which boasts 327 different ways of demanding food and features a timekeeping and calendar system based on meals and naps. A short trill followed by a series of staccato meows, for example, means “I expect prompt service at salmon o’clock,” while a truncated meow ending with a scoff is used to indicate displeasure when a human napping substrate tosses too much during sleep.
Still, maybe we’ll dress it up to make it look properly academic and give the challenge a try. Those prizes could buy a lot of Roombas!
The new puma will have big paw prints to fill if it decides to make its famous predecessor’s range its own. People in Los Angeles are thrilled to have another mountain lion prowling the Hollywood Hills.
When the mountain lion known as P-22 died in late 2022, people in Los Angeles were so distraught they painted murals of him on building facades, buried him after a indigenous tribal funeral and even held a festival in his honor.
The famous feline had already been the subject of books, documentaries and an iconic photograph by National Geographic’s Steve Winter. The image showed P-22 in mid-stride, perfectly centered in a small pool of light beneath the Hollywood sign in the hills of Los Angeles at night. It was a natural symbol of wildlife adapting and surviving.
The love for P-22 wasn’t only based on the incredible fact that a mountain lion had established his “range” in Griffith Park, an oasis of wilderness surrounded by urban landscapes. The puma had to cross Interstate 405 and Route 101, heavy-traffic highways that are famously lethal to his species, to get there. For the next decade he skillfully avoided cars and trucks as he went about his business, popping up on trail cameras or in the backyards of Los Angelinos.
Now there’s a potential successor to the vacant throne.
The new puma isn’t collared and wildlife experts don’t know where it came from, but like P-22 it had to cross several dangerous highways to reach the city.
It’s not clear yet if the mountain lion is male or female. Jeff Sikitch, a biologist with the National Parks Service who is part of an ongoing, decades-long study of pumas, told the Los Angeles Times that he thinks the cat is likely a young male, but there’s not much to go on so far except for witness sightings and a low-resolution video taken by a man who lives in an apartment building near the edge of Griffith Park.
“Will this cat be as skilled as P-22 was at avoiding cars for a decade?” the National Wildlife Federation’s Beth Pratt told the BBC. “We don’t know what’s going to happen here.”
The only images of the newcomer so far are grainy video stills, but Griffith Park itself has trail cameras that are used to monitor wildlife. Credit: Vladimir Polumiskov
For now, wildlife officials are waiting and watching to see if the potential puma successor puts down roots in P-22’s old hunting grounds or tries to make the dangerous trek out of the city.
If the new puma decides to stay, it will enjoy plentiful deer and a benefit most members of its species do not have — a local population that understands mountain lion attacks are extraordinarily rare, and will support them by giving them a wide berth.
On the other hand, despite the 4,000 acres of Griffith Park and the residential neighborhoods below, the cat’s inherited range would be much smaller than what’s typical for the species. Like humans cramming belongings into apartments, pumas sacrifice space when they live in or around cities.
Suzanne Pye, a local who admired P-22 from afar, said she welcomes the newcomer and isn’t worried about attacks on people. The presence of a mountain lion after almost 18 months without one prowling the hills, she said, will add “a frisson of excitement to the morning hikes.”
A close-up of P-22 in 2019, when he was briefly captured for a health check-up. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Rumors of big cats in the UK countryside have persisted for years, with witness claims from all over the country. The latest reported sighting was in northern England.
People who really want to believe big cats are running around the British countryside are ecstatic with the news that a DNA sample from a dead sheep reportedly tested positive for panthera DNA.
The DNA sample was swabbed from a freshly-killed sheep carcass “at an undisclosed upland location” in Cumbria, northwest England, a witness told BBC Wildlife. It’s exactly the kind of countryside where people have been reporting big cat sightings for years, although the sightings aren’t confined to that area, with other witnesses claiming they’ve seen large felids as far as the UK’s southern coast.
Sharon Larkin-Snowden, who lives nearby, told a big cat enthusiast podcaster that she disturbed the “big cat” while it was feeding. The startled felid took off and jumped a stone wall, leaving the partially-eaten sheep, Larkin-Snowden said.
“I assumed at first it was a sheepdog, but then I did a double take and realised it was a black cat,” she said. “It was big – the size of a German shepherd dog.”
“I could really go for a Chinese! Anyone else wanna go for a Chinese?”
A swab was collected — the details are sketchy on who did the collecting and when exactly they submitted the sample — and sent to the University of Warwick’s Robin Allaby, a professor of life sciences.
Allaby, whose specialty is studying the genetics and evolution of domesticated plants, began offering a DNA testing service for the public some 12 years ago in response to the persistent rumors of big cats in the countryside. In the past samples have yielded DNA from foxes and other animals, but Allaby says this one matched the genetic profile of a big cat, although he cannot say which species.
It’s not unusual for a DNA sample to match to a genus, in this case panthera, but not to a specific species if the sample was degraded or only partial.
Rick Minter, who has made a career of tracking alleged big cat sightings across the UK, says he believes the mystery cat is a leopard. Leopards and jaguars are the only two big cats who have true melanistic color morphs — meaning some of them have virtually all-black coats — and Minter says he believes it’s more likely the former.
Neither are native to the UK or Europe: Leopards range from Africa to Asia, while jaguars range from south to Central America, with some populations edging slightly into the US.
Britain’s big cat enthusiasts say they believe pumas are among the wild cats living in Credit: Jean Paul Montanaro/Pexels
Why isn’t a DNA match evidence of big cats in the UK?
If the lab results say the sample came from a big cat and that result is consistent with the witness account, what’s the problem?
Chain of custody, for one. We don’t know anything about who took the sample, where it was taken, the time elapsed between the kill and the sample swab, or who may have handled it before it reached Allaby.
In fact, we don’t know if there was a dead sheep to begin with.
If I were a prankster living in the UK, for example, and was friendly with a keeper at a local zoo, I could have the keeper swab an animal, bag it and hand it over to me. There are dozens of conceivable ways a person could obtain a sample even if they don’t know someone who works in a zoo.
“So we left the sheep there at the edge of the field and made sure the lady saw us before we buggered off over the fence. Next day, we was in all the papers! A right laugh that was, mate.”
The problem is the provenance of the sample and what happens to it between the time it’s collected and ends up in the hands of a scientist like Allaby.
This is why chain of custody is paramount in criminal trials, and why there must be a complete record of who handled samples from collection in the field to the lab. Even in the absence of foul play, an improperly handled sample can be contaminated and render test results meaningless.
It’s not a matter of trust, it’s the simple fact that extraordinary claims require extraordary evidence, as Carl Sagan was fond of saying. Short of capturing one of these animals or getting clear, indisputable footage, any other claimed proof has to be ironclad.
Speaking of footage, that’s another issue. It’s extremely difficult to believe that a breeding population of big cats can exist in the UK countryside for years or even decades without a single definitive photo or video. The UK’s rural areas may not be blanketed by CCTV cameras like London, but they’re not the Amazon either. People live, work and farm in those regions, cameras are more ubiquitous than ever, and farmers take steps to protect their livestock, including installing cameras.
Big cats don’t just feed and vanish into the mist. They mark trees with their claws and urine, they leave distinct pug marks, they leave distinctive bite marks on their prey, and they make noise. To paraphrase one naturalist, when big cats are living nearby, you know it. Even if you don’t see them, signs of their presence are ubiquitous.
To accept the claims of tigers, leopards and pumas gallavanting in the fields around small towns and villages, we’d have to suspend disbelief or conclude that these are some sort of previously unknown ghost cats who can fade in and out of the physical plane.
I’m not a skeptic to be a killjoy. If big cats really were running around the UK, that would be a hell of a story. But we’d still need convincing evidence, and this isn’t it.
A group of people in North Carolina plucked two bear cubs off of a tree, dancing and laughing as they took selfies with the traumatized baby animals.
The World Wildlife Federation’s last Living Planet Report warned in 2022 that 69 percent of all wildlife has disappeared since 1970. A terrifying report from conservationists this year brought news that the natural world has fallen silent, with billions of animals erased from existence.
Why?
Because humans reproduce and rampage across the planet, no longer subject to survival of the fittest, with absolutely no regard for the species we share our world with.
That was proven again this week when a group of five people spotted bear cubs clinging to a tree not far from an apartment complex in Fairview, North Carolina, and decided the best course of action was to tear the terrified cubs off the branches so they could take selfies with them.
“So she can say, ‘Here, take my picture, post it all over. I’m holding a black bear,'” a horrified witness, 21-year-old Rachel Staudt, said as she filmed the group on Tuesday. “That’s insane. That’s 100% what she’s doing. She’s taking pictures of him.”
A still from Staudt’s video shows members of the group holding the bear cubs.
The woman called the authorities, who responded with a biologist from the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, but not before the damage was done.
“Did she just drop it?” the woman filming the group said as one of the group members did a “celebratory dance move,” dropped one of the cubs, then chased it to get it back and take more photos.
The group told police and the biologist that both bears had “escaped,” but the biologist found one of the traumatized cubs near a retention pond on the property.
“The cub appeared to be lethargic and frightened. It looked to be favoring one of its front paws and was wet and shivering,” Game Mammals and Surveys Supervisor Colleen Olfenbuttel told CBS News. “The cub’s condition is likely a result of the unnecessary and irresponsible actions of the people involved.”
That cub has now been orphaned, as authorities said it’s not in any condition to be returned to the wild and will have to be raised and rehabilitated for the next four to six years. The other cub couldn’t be found. Hopefully it escaped.
The orphaned and traumatized bear cub that was recovered Tuesday after a group of people plucked the cub and its sibling out of a tree to take selfies with them.
Authorities noted it’s not uncommon for mother bears to leave their cubs briefly to go foraging, much like mother cats do with kittens and cubs when they need to hunt to feed themselves.
Common sense and a basic respect for wildlife is usually enough to keep people from snatching the animals, but much like people who pay money to take selfish with tigers who have been sedated to their eyeballs, any concern for the welfare of animals — if it existed in the first place — is quickly shelved as people can’t resist the opportunity to grab a selfie in the age of narcissism-fueled social media.
Authorities say they’re conducting an investigation, although it’s not clear what needs to be investigated. The people involved documented their behavior with selfies, and Staudt’s video clearly shows them handling the confused and scared baby animals.
The kind of ignorance demonstrated by the group doesn’t remedy itself. Authorities should make an example of them by prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law while redoubling efforts to educate people about keeping their distance from wild animals. And if that’s not enough motivation, or if people can’t be bothered to respect wildlife, they should consider that this would be a very different story if the cubs’ mother had been nearby.
Have you ever wanted to own or design your own zoo?
Visitors to Buddy’s Tropical Paradise are greeted by friendly staff who man the entrance, a broad vertical garden shaped like an arch that straddles the main path leading inside.
When they walk through the gate a new vista opens up before them: tiered tropical gardens, waterfalls, and wide boulevards lined with palm trees and flowers. They hear the rumble of big cats calling to each other in the distance and monkeys shrieking as they fling themselves from branch to branch.
Welcome to Buddy’s Tropical Paradise!
A monorail carries passengers above, its tracks looping over animal enclosures and threading tunnels that emerge amid the terraced jungle, eateries and souvenir shops.
And straight ahead, the first exhibit: a sprawling habitat occupied by jaguars who are enjoying some yums and will probably have a nap in a few minutes.
Buddy’s Tropical Paradise doesn’t exist in the real world, of course. It’s my first attempt at fully functional, guest-attracting park in Planet Zoo, a simulator that allows you to do practically anything you can think of.
You can design your own habitats, enclosures, buildings and scenery. Fancy a monorail that laps the entire zoo? You can do that. Picturing a 1940s style Tarzan-themed jungle boat ride where visitors can see caiman, capuchin monkeys and jaguars up close? Start carving up the river, my friend!
A Bengal tiger stalking the tall grass in Planet Zoo.
Lunch time in the jaguar habitat, followed by the all-important nap time.
As the zoo’s architect, you’re responsible for everything. You’ll need veterinary facilities, animal quarantine, keeper huts. You’ll need to staff your park with veterinarians, keepers, security officers, maintenance staff and mechanics.
And don’t forget the vendors to run the souvenir shops and man the food stalls, where your guests can grab hot dogs or cool off with slushies on a hot day.
A suitable home for your animals
Designing a habitat is about a lot more than reserving space for your animals. You’re tasked with picking the right barriers, mindful of which species can climb or leap great heights. A good habitat should reflect the animal’s home in the wild with appropriate flora, temperatures the species thrives in and a feeding system that mimics the way they’d naturally obtain food.
Elephants cool off in their enclosure in Planet Zoo. Every habitat must be designed with the right atmosphere, flora, terrain, shelter and enrichment appropriate for the species it houses.
A wide view of my orangutan habitat. Two orangutans are at the base of the stone steps in the distance.
Cheetah sisters.
Then there’s enrichment. Trees for your monkeys to climb, ponds for your tigers to take a dip, bushes for your elephants to strip. Different species enjoy different toys and challenges. An ice block with meat in the middle would hit the spot for carnivores on a hot summer day, but your pandas will want bamboo.
Designing habitats and getting them just right is not only fun, it’s an intuitive way to learn about the needs of individual species and how they live.
The leopard learning incident
My first stab at building a leopard enclosure was a disaster. It looked pretty enough with its Hindu-inspired temple architecture and pond. There were plenty of scratching posts and trees that could withstand claws.
I installed a sprinkler to help the big cats cool off, designed a series of raised platforms for them to climb, and scattered enrichment items all over the habitat. The leopards had balls to bat around, boxes to sit in, rubbing pads, logs and rocks to climb, and plenty of cover and shade.
But when I had the leopards brought into the zoo, through quarantine and into their exhibit, I realized you can’t just design a home for animals from an aesthetic perspective. I’d used several plant and tree species that weren’t native to leopard habitats, the terrain was wrong and I hadn’t paid any mind to ambient temperature.
Making those mistakes was truly educational. When your animals aren’t happy in Planet Zoo, protesters show up, and it’s up to you to read the alerts about where you went wrong and how to remedy your mistakes. It’s an intuitive and fun way to learn about each species and the environments they thrive in.
The escaped jaguar
I’m still learning the ropes, although I do have a basic knowledge of the way the game is designed thanks to some time playing Frontier’s theme park building game, Planet Coaster. The first time I tried to build a jaguar enclosure, I forgot to wall off a viewing cave with protective glass, which my guests did not appreciate.
Even though jaguars don’t like to confront humans, a big cat is a big cat, and the game sent me urgent warnings as people ran for the exits. When I found the escaped jag, he was lounging not far from his enclosure, watching people freak out.
Enrichment is a key aspect of habitat design. Toys, puzzles, obstacles, climbing platforms for arboreal species, ponds for animals who like to get wet — they’re all necessary to keep animals healthy and happy.
In real life it’d be a disaster, but I was able to revert to a previous save, make sure the viewing cave was sufficiently protected, and this time around I placed only two jaguars — a male and a female — in the large enclosure.
After a while, while I was tinkering with an exhibit meant for capuchin monkeys, the game sent me an alert: the female jaguar was pregnant! She gave birth to two energetic, curious cubs who are currently having fun chasing each other around the enclosure and going for dips in their pond.
Part of the main boulevard in Buddy’s Tropical Paradise, viewed at night. Players are responsible for everything you see here — lighting, shops, flowers and plants, benches, waste baskets and more.
Shops and a monorail station in an unfinished Asia-themed area of the zoo.
As in real life, the game has you source animals from an international pool, with information on breeding and genetics so you can contribute to conservation. When you adopt animals, their first stop is the veterinary facilities for examination, then quarantine. When they pass quarantine, you can have your staff release them into their enclosures.
It took me several hours to familiarize myself with the basics, design an entrance and a main boulevard for the guests, create some tiered gardens with eateries and shops, and get my jaguar and orangutan exhibits up and running.
My monorail currently runs out of track a quarter of the way through the park, and my river boat ride looks pretty cool, with dense jungle, towering trees and the ruins of Mayan temples not far from shore, but completing it will require appropriate barriers to keep the animals in as well as building out more scenery.
A jaguar in her habitat.
I’ve got my sights set on an elephant exhibit next. It will be necessarily huge, so it’s good to reserve the land early and plan smaller exhibits and facilities around it. I’d also like to put the elephants, lions, zebra, giraffes etc into one Africa-themed section of the park, while the tigers, giant pandas and snow monkeys will be housed in an Asia-themed section, with buildings that reflect the architectural styles of countries like Japan and China.
There are also aquatic exhibits, animals for your own reptile house and aviaries. Those enclosures are more complex than the relatively straightforward orangutan exhibit, for example, so I’ll have to spend some time figuring out what makes a good home for peacocks, sharks and komodo dragons.
So far I’ve resisted the temptation to make one giant felid park, with snow leopards, pumas and cheetahs joining the tigers, lions, jaguars and others. Of course I did name it Buddy’s Tropical Paradise, so I may be forced down the all-cat road if Bud gets his say.
Planet Zoo is not a traditional video game. There are no winners or losers, and there’s no “end state” unless you intentionally include one.
It’s more relaxing and much slower-paced than your typical game, and it’s a great feeling when you’ve managed to take something from your imagination and perfect the design. When you want to check your progress or just admire your own work, you can set the camera to follow guests and watch as people stroll through your zoo, taking in the sights and sounds.
In that sense it’s more like a virtual model train set or living diorama. You can load up the game and tinker with your zoo when you’ve got a spare 15 minutes, or spend a few hours getting absorbed in the finer details of how to keep pangolin and red pandas happy.
Planet Zoo is appropriate for all ages, although its depth and complexity would probably be a lot for younger kids. In that case, it’s probably best to have an adult guide them so they understand the game is built on interlocking systems: exhibits need power and water, shops need staff, veterinary surgeries need veterinarians and so on.
It’ll have enormous appeal to kids who enjoy Lego, Minecraft and other building games, so if you’ve got a little builder in your life, this could be a good fit. But make no mistake, there’s a lot here for adults to enjoy too.
PITB verdict: Four out of five paws!
The only thing keeping Planet Zoo back from a five-paw rating is the DLC (downloadable content) scheme, which requires users to pay extra for certain “packs” containing extra animals, scenery pieces and scenarios. That’s a problem plaguing the larger video game industry, but if you wait for a sale, the normally $44.95 game can be had for as low as $11.24 on Steam. DLC is likewise discounted. Steam’s summer sale is a great opportunity to get games like this for a fraction of their normal price. This year’s summer sale is scheduled for June 27, though it’s possible Planet Zoo could be put on sale before then as well.
Pain In The Bud 