Most cats wouldn’t go near water if you promised them a barrel of Temptations, but a handful of special felines love to swim and play in the ocean.
Someone over at Hearst Television was digging through the company’s video archives and unearthed this gem from 30 years ago.
It’s a short news segment about Toby the cat, who liked to hang out with his human so much that he happily took to playing in the ocean.
“I’d jog on the beach at night, and he’d run into the water with me,” Toby’s human, Teddy Townsend, told Hearst.
A news crew caught up with the human-feline pair at Ormond-By-The-Sea, an oceanside community on Florida’s east coast, about an hour’s drive south of St. Augustine.
“I just started taking him out in the water,” Townsend said as Toby perched happily on his shoulder.
The surf board came later as Townsend looked for a way to make time in the water more fun for his pal.
“He surfs, I don’t surf,” Townsend explained, smiling.
Townsend didn’t have Toby on any harness or other restraint, and it was pretty clear the little guy wasn’t going anywhere without his human. Footage of the tubular tabby showed him skillfully balancing on the board while cresting and riding a series of small waves.
Check out the 1995 segment here:
Surfing cats are pretty rare, but not unheard of. A 2016 story detailed the adventures of Kuli, a one-eyed rescue cat from Honolulu who loves to surf with his humans. (Kuli is pictured in the header image, above, and in the image below.)
Kuli lost an eye at just four months old due to an infection, and endured lots of baths during his formative months to prevent another infection from taking hold. Alexandra, one of his humans, said she believes that’s why Kuli is so calm in the water.
“For a while I took Kuli out on my long boards, but it wasn’t until I was playing around with a boogie board one day that I realised he really loved to get his claws into the foamy material,” she said. “So we bought a board that Kuli would be able to get out on the surf with.”
Kuli on his board. Credit: Caters News Agency
Here at Casa de Buddy, I asked His Grace if he’d like to dip into the ocean and have fun by learning to surf.
By unlocking the mysteries of how sperm whales communicate and demonstrating their impressive cognitive abilities, researchers hope to get people invested in the fate of these endangered animals.
Sperm whales are chatty.
Their language is markedly different from the deep cetacean moans associated with other whales, taking the form of Morse code-like clicks that boom through the ocean in a decibel range almost twice that of jet engines.
And while we’ve long known animals like monkeys assign specific meaning to short vocalizations varying from alarm calls to affirmations of social rank, sperm whale conversations can endure for an hour or more, with participants exchanging complex strings of clicks that vary depending on context, environment and even which pod family is speaking.
An aerial view of a sperm whale near the ocean surface. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
While artificial intelligence has been maligned over the past few years as people grapple with its rapid progress and potential for abuse, it remains the best tool we have for teasing out patterns that our human minds can’t discern, especially from large quantities of data.
With more than 9,000 recordings of sperm whales, Project CETI — Cetacean Translation Initiative, a non-profit effort to decode and translate sperm whale communication — had precisely the kind of huge data cache that AI excels at analyzing.
By feeding the recordings into specially trained machine learning algorithms, the research team was able to identify a wealth of new language patterns. While human languages are composed of quantized morphemes — prefixes, suffixes and root words — whale communication is broken down into sequences of clicks and pauses called “codas.”
Like Morse code, codas make a distinction between short clicks and long clicks. Sperm whales also vary the tempo of the clicks, which could represent inflection, “dialects” or concepts completely alien to the human mind.
“Some of what they’re doing might be totally different from our way of communicating and we’re probably never going to be able to fully grasp those differences,” Oregon State postdoctoral marine researcher Taylor Hersh told NPR.
A sperm whale fluke visible above the surface of the ocean. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Researchers believe the “inter-click intervals” — akin to ghost notes in music — may be as significant as the clicks themselves. Importantly, while human ears were able to identify and catalog some of the codas, the machine learning algorithms found many that human analysis missed.
That’s not surprising considering sperm whales — the loudest animals on Earth, capable of generating sounds up to 230 dB — took a much different evolutionary course and, as ocean-dwelling creatures weighing up to 90,000 pounds (40,800 kg) likely have a radically different sensorium compared to humans.
The comparisons to music go further than ghost notes.
“This study shows that coda types are not arbitrary, but rather that they form a newly discovered combinatorial coding system in which the musical concepts of rubato and ornamentation combine with two categorical, context-independent features known as rhythm and tempo, by analogy to musical terminology,” CETI’s team wrote on May 7 while unveiling the most recent study.
Sperm whale distribution based on human sightings. Sperm whales freely travel the oceans except in cold, ice-packed environs. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
While people have used many abilities to mark the dividing line between humans and animals over the years — including the ability to use tools, experience emotions, and demonstrate self-awareness — human capacity for authentic language with syntax and context-dependent meaning was one of the stalwarts, standing the test of time as new research toppled the other dividers by showing animals do indeed use tools, experience rich emotions and have complex inner mental lives.
With this research, scientists are assembling a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet” that will make it easier to discern and catalog whale codas.
To be clear, there’s still a lot of work ahead before scientists can prove sperm whale codas are comparable to human definitions of language, but whether they strictly meet that definition may not matter. After all, it’s clear the clicks and pauses of whale codas are imbued with meaning, even if it remains elusive to us for the moment.
Indeed, “sperm whale communication has both contextual and combinatorial structure not previously observed in whale communication,” the team wrote.
Proving sperm whale codas are tantamount to human language isn’t the goal anyway. The team has two overriding priorities — decode the meanings behind the codas, and get the wider public invested in the fate of these endangered animals by showing they’re not so different from us.
“Our results show there is much more complexity than previously believed,” MIT AI lab director Daniela Rus told NPR, “and this is challenging the current state of the art or state of beliefs about the animal world.”
Pain In The Bud 