Humpbacks as a Model for Interstellar Communication

Josephine Hubbard and Lisa Walker are researchers in the SETI-Templeton Humpback Whale Research team within the McCowan-Vandeleest Laboratory of Biobehavioral Complexity, co-directed by Brenda McCowan, which seeks to understand how spatial and mathematical relations of networks relate to the content and quality of relationships and how such variation influences a diversity of health outcomes.

Josephine (“Josie”) Hubbard is a graduate student in the Animal Behavior Graduate Group at the University of California Davis. Her research explores the interaction between behavioral flexibility and cognition with an animals’ propensity to adjust to anthropogenic disturbance and engage in human-wildlife interactions. Josie is a primatologist by training, having studied primates both in the wild and captivity for the last decade spanning across four continents. However, her research interests span beyond the primate order and in more recent years she has begun to investigate these questions in other branches of the animal kingdom such as songbirds and cetaceans.

Lisa Walker is a whale song theorist. She takes her background in music and applies it to understanding the song of the humpback whale. Her studies are informed by traditional field research, artificial intelligence, information theory and immersive underwater observations of singing whales. Lisa believes humpback song and human music share a deep pattern logic and aims to design an interspecies language based on this logic to interact with these beings in a meaningful way. While melody has been her primary focus, her current studies include investigating the temporal patterns of rhythms as the primary building block of both human and humpback whale song. 

The lecture will be given via Zoom. Please register to participate.

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