Scientists decode orangutan communication using machine learning

Wendy Erb has spent countless hours studying orangutans in Borneo's tropical peatland forests in order to learn how male Bornean orangutans communicate. "Orangutans have extraordinary strength and big males have a penchant for finding standing dead trees and shaking, pushing or pulling them until they topple in a tremendous crash," Erb told Salon. "While vocal complexity is an important concept in animal communication – thought to be shaped by animals’ social and physical environments – we are lacking a unifying framework for quantifying complexity," Erb said. "For species like orangutans, whose sounds fall along a ‘graded’ continuum, we don’t yet know how to interpret the apparently low number of ‘discrete’ sounds; however, we are fairly confident there is much complexity still to unpack in this great ape’s vocal system." "Our study points to the need to develop a comparative framework for quantifying and comparing complexity within and across species with such graded repertoires," Erb said.