https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02441-8?utm_source=www.mindstream.news&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=unis-give-up-on-ai-cheaters
Acoustic tracking technology could feed into conservation projects in the Amazon and beyond.
Botos use clicks and whistles to communicate with each other and to find prey.
Researchers have used artificial intelligence (AI) to map the movements of two endangered species of dolphin in the Amazon River by training a neural network to recognize the animals’ unique clicks and whistles.
The findings, published in Scientific Reports on 27 July1, could lead to better conservation strategies by helping researchers to build an accurate picture of the dolphins’ movements across a vast area of rainforest that becomes submerged each year after the rainy season.
Using sound is much less invasive than conventional tracking techniques, such as the use of GPS tags, boats or aerial drones.
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“Sound is probably the only sense that we know of that we all share on Earth,” says co-author Michel André, a bioacoustician at the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain.
André and his colleagues wanted to explore the activity of two species, the boto (Inia geoffrensis) — also known as the pink river dolphin — and the tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis) across the floodplains of the Mamirauá reserve in northern Brazil. The researchers placed underwater microphones at several sites to eavesdrop on the animals’ whereabouts.
To distinguish the dolphin sounds from the noisy soundscape of the Amazon, they turned to AI, feeding the recordings into a deep-learning neural network capable of categorizing sounds in real time, “exactly as we do with our own brain”, says André.
Using this technology, researchers can analyse volumes of information “that would otherwise be almost impossible”, says Federico Mosquera-Guerra, who studies Amazonian dolphins at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá.
The AI was trained to identify three types of sound: dolphin, rainfall and boat engines. Both dolphin species use echolocation clicks almost constantly to sense their environment, and they communicate to others by whistling. Detecting these clicks and whistles enabled the researchers to map the animals’ movements. Botos and tucuxis have distinct whistles, so the neural network could distinguish between the species.