Jeffrey T. Reed

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86 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2025 last heard Jun 2025

Jeffrey T. Reed’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TED Talks Daily · Can AI help us speak with wolves? | Jeffrey T. Reed · 2 Jun 2025 podcast

These battery-operated devices use AI to record only the sound and motion that matters to the scientist, saving them time and money.

but they can do a lot of other things, like tell me the precise location of a sound, for example, the where and when of a poacher's gunshot.

Last year, researchers hiked into the backcountry to place ARUs all across the Greater Yellowstone, including one near this wolf den site, to study wolf communication.

Wolves have over 20 different call types, including barks, yelps, whimpers, whines, moans, woas and even teeth clacking.

And they're one of a few species who collectively communicate in what's called a chorus howl.

Now, the pups first hear this dictionary of sounds at their birth dens, and so we departed, and one month later, the pack arrived, and the pregnant alpha female claimed the den.

Her nose is poking out of the den, and she's taking a well-deserved pregnancy nap.

Now, three months later, I created this visual representation of every sound recorded at the den site for the month of July.

And AI looks for patterns in this data, and the ARUs don't sleep at night, so they were able to record all of these wolf howls.

But a howl isn't just a howl.

These are spectrograms of 50 individual wolf howls.

A spectrogram simply visualizes sound, and your eyes and AI can see patterns in them.

Here's the howl from just one of those wolves.

and hears all 50 wolf howls at the same time.

software algorithms help us find signal in that noise.

And researchers have already determined that wolves can identify one another just from their howls, but we do not know yet if they have names like Teddy or Rachel, or if it's more like you picking up the phone and recognizing that person's voice on the other end.

Now, a howl basically means, here I am.

Where are you?

But we've found five functions for different types of howls, including this one, which is used in contexts of distress.

Now, this is where it gets interesting to me.

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