Is Anyone Listening?: What Animals Are Saying to Each Other and to Us

From a leading researcher on dolphin communication, a deep dive into the many ways animal species communicate with their kin, their neighboring species, and us.

If you could pose one question to a dolphin, what would it be? And what might a dolphin ask you? For forty years, researcher and author Denise L. Herzing has investigated these and related questions of marine mammal communication. With the assistance of a friendly community of Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas, Herzing studies two-way communication between different dolphin species and between humans and dolphins using a variety of cutting-edge experiments. But the dolphins are not the only ones talking, and in this wide-ranging and accessible book, Herzing explores the astonishing realities of interspecies communication, a skill that humans currently lack.

Is Anyone Listening? connects research on dolphin communication to findings from Jane Goodall on chimpanzees, Dian Fossey on mountain gorillas, Cynthia Moss on African elephants, and others driving today’s exploration of possible animal languages. Although humans have long attempted to crack animal communication codes, only now do we have the advanced machine-learning tools to help. As Herzing reveals, researchers are finding fascinating hints of language in nonhuman species, including linguistic structures, vowel equivalents, and complex repeated sequences. By looking at the many ways animals use and manipulate signals, we see that we’ve only just begun to appreciate the diversity of animal intelligence and the complicated and subtle aspects of animal communication.

Considering dolphins and other nonhuman animals as colleagues instead of research subjects, Herzing asks us to meet animals as both speakers and listeners, as mutually curious beings, and to listen to what they are saying.

As research director of the Wild Dolphin Project, Denise L. Herzing has completed forty years of a long-term study on the Atlantic spotted dolphins of the Bahamas. She is also an affiliate assistant professor in biology at Florida Atlantic University, coeditor of Dolphin Communication and Cognition, and the author of Dolphin Diaries: My 25 Years with Spotted Dolphins in the Bahamas and The Wild Dolphin Project