A scientist has brought us closer to talking to animals, and it's won her the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize for two-way interspecies communication.
Dr Julie Elie from the University of California, Berkeley decoded the 11 core calls made by the zebra finch to understand their vocabulary and language.
Elie was rewarded for her groundbreaking study, discovering that these birds recognize each other and use individual calls to acknowledge personal greetings. She also found that they have a way of announcing who they are when they encounter another zebra finch and express what they're doing to the other bird.
“I’m really super-honored,” Elie says on winning the US$100,000 prize.
She also said that hopefully her work brings us a step closer to the “great endeavor” of communicating with animals.
Amusingly, she also found that birds often confuse calls with similar meanings more often than vocalizations that sounded alike.
The prize, launched in 2024 by the Jeremy Coller Foundation, also offers a massive $10 million prize to the scientist or research team that successfully facilitates human-animal communication.
Elie settled on zebra finches (Taeniopygia spp.) as her study subjects because they're chatty creatures, therefore offering plenty of material to try to decipher.
“The question I asked myself when hearing these chatty songbirds was: What are they saying?” she says.
In her research, which now spans more than a decade, the scientist has meticulously tracked and recorded zebra finch calls, sorting them into various categories and contexts. She then put this expansive catalogue through machine learning tools to find patterns that could serve as clues to the "language" used by the animals.
After her extensive research, Elie worked with the birds to see how they responded to a button-triggered series of calls, and found that they were discerning, more interested in some than others.
“Their responses indicated they have a mental imagery of the meaning of their vocalizations,” Elie says. “In other words, that they understand the meaning of their call types.”
According to Professor Jonathan Birch, from the London School of Economics, Elie had done incredible work “not just building up a dictionary of the 11 ‘core words’ of the zebra finch’s vocabulary, but also asking the finches themselves, through ingenious experimental techniques, whether she’s got the meanings right. It’s a stunning example of how to move rigorously from recording thousands of calls to understanding their meanings.”
Source: The Guardian
Fact-checked by Mike McRae
