In 2004 AWF, entered into a collaboration with an interesting cross-disciplinary research team from SETI Institute and University of California, Davis. Using the mathematical discipline of Information Theory, this collaborative effort found that some organizational features of bottlenose dolphins' repertoire have measures that are suprisingly similar to human language. The first publication from this team appeared in 1999 in the scientific journal Animal Behaviour and can be found as a link at the bottom of this page. After events occurred that made it no longer possible to work with captive bottlenose dolphins, the team has sought out other opportunities to evaluate communication systems with interesting structure and function. Fred Sharpe's extensive collection of humpback whale recordings and AWF's in-depth knowledge of the marine ecosystem in Southeast Alaskan waters offered a unique opportunity to expand the SETI/UC Davis collaboration to include AWF. Together scientists at these organizations are seeking to better understand the humpback whale's communication system as it is used in Southeast Alaska. This collaborative research project is discussed in greater detail on our research page.
Sean Hanser
Graduate Researcher, University of California, Davis
e-mail: sfhanser@ucdavis.edu
Sean is a doctoral candidate under Dr. Brenda McCowan in the Ecology Graduate Group at University of California, Davis. He has collaborated on research with Brenda since 1994. His bachelors degree is from University of California, Santa Cruz in marine biology. Sean's dissertation, which he is currently writing, focuses on measuring the organizational complexity of humpback whales' vocal repertoire and assessing the impacts of human generated noise on humpback whale communication behavior. Sean is the primary investigator on the collaborative project between AWF, SETI, and UC Davis, and is taking the lead on integrating Fred Sharpe's years of data and recordings with current understanding of communication theory.
Dr. Brenda McCowan
Associate Professioal Researcher/Research Behaviorist at University of California, Davis
e-mail: bmccowan@vmtrc.ucdavis.edu
Brenda is animal behaviorist who received her Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University. Her areas of scientific interest is in behavioral biology and ecology with an emphasis on both the basic and applied aspects of animal behavior and communication for enhancing wildlife health and conservation, captive exotic species and laboratory animal management, and domesticated animal production, health and well-being. Brenda directs the primate behavioral management program at the California National Primate Research Center.
Brenda is also a major advisor to a group of graduate students at UC Davis that include Sean Hanser. She has been contributing to the field of cetacean research and marine mammal science in general for more than 20 years. Some of her most significant research in this field established a mathematical method for categorizing bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) whistles and applying information theory to provide insight into the structure and organizational complexity of dolphins' whistle communication.
Dr. Laurance Doyle
Principal Investigator, SETI Institute & President of PlanetQuest
e-mail: ldoyle@seti.org
Laurance is an astrophysicist who specializes in pattern recognition techniques. He has applied his expertise to finding Earth-size plants around twin stars using ground-based telescopes. His Ph.D. came from University of Heidelberg in Germany where he studied the structure of the planet Saturn's rings. Laurance is the originator of the transit detection method for discovering planets. This technique looks for very small drops in light levels as planets pass in front of the stars they orbit around. By predicting and measuring the drop in light, scientists can estimate the size of the planet and its rate of orbit.
Pattern recognition isn't only used in astronomy; it is useful in virtually every branch of science. Laurance's expertice in pattern recognition allows him to work in other areas such as communication theory. In 1997, Laurance teamed up with Brenda McCowan and Sean Hanser, to explore the whistle communication system of bottlenose dolphins. Since that time, Laurance has enjoyed expanding his research with Brenda and Sean to include exploration of a variety of communcation systems from unusual human communication such as Gomera Silbo, the whistle language of the Canary Islands, and Rongo Rongo, the only written polynesian language, to considering the complexity of the waggle dance of the honeybee and the chemical communication of cotton plants.