Animal Intelligence

How smart are animals — and how do we know? With a special co-host joining the show, this season explores cognition across the animal kingdom. Featuring fieldwork, lab experiments, and comparative psychology, the episodes shed light on communication, memory, planning, and even tool use in species from ants to apes. Grounded in empirical science, it’s a skeptical yet awe-inspiring look at the non-human mind.

Episodes

• Animal Intelligence Final Exam — Join us for our capstone episode on the Animal Intelligence season. We recap what we loved, what we learned, and things we wish we had gotten to spend more time on. This is a great episode to see how
• Open Animal Tracks — Our guest today is Risa Shinoda, a PhD student at Kyoto University Agricultural Systems Engineering Lab, where she applies computer vision techniques. She talked about the OpenAnimalTracks dataset and
• Bird Distribution Modeling with Satbird — This episode features an interview with Mélisande Teng, a PhD candidate at Université de Montréal. Her research lies in the intersection of remote sensing and computer vision for biodiversity monitori
• Ant Encounters — In this interview with author Deborah Gordon, Kyle asks questions about the mechanisms at work in an ant colony and what ants might teach us about how to build artificial intelligence. Ants are surpri
• Computing Toolbox — This season it’s become clear that computing skills are vital for working in the natural sciences. In this episode, we were fortunate to speak with Madlen Wilmes, co-author of the book "Computing Skil
• Biodiversity Monitoring — In this episode, we talked shop with Hager Radi about her biodiversity monitoring work. While biodiversity modeling may sound simple, count organisms and mark their location, there is a lot more to it
• Hacking the Colony — Today, Ashay Aswale and Tony Lopez shared their work on swarm robotics and what they have learned from ants. Robotic swarms must solve the same problems that eusocial insects do. What if your pheromon
• Primate Poses — During this season we have talked with researchers working to utilize machine learning for behavioral observations. In previous episodes, you have heard about the software people like Richard use, but
• Generating 3D Animals with YouDream — Generative AI can struggle to create realistic animals and 2D representations often have mistakes like extra limbs and tails. If 2D wasn’t hard enough, there are researchers working on generative 3D m
• Weird Communication — Today, we sat down with Dr. Ignacio Escalante Meza to learn about opiliones and treehoppers. Opiliones, known as “daddy long legs” in the US, are understudied arachnids known for their tenacious locom
• Reducing the Impact of Ship Noise on Marine Mammals — Human shipping operations have increased significantly in the past few decades. While that means international trade and cheap goods for humans, it also means the ocean has experienced an increase in
• Analysis of Unstructured Data — Robbie Moon from the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business joins us to discuss the analysis of unstructured data and the application of NLP methodologies towards financial data.
• iNaturalist — Have you ever participated in citizen science? Do you want to? One of the most popular platforms for crowdsourcing biodiversity data is iNaturalist. In addition to being a great science tool, the iNat
• Learn to Code — Do you code or are you interested in learning to code? Join us today and hear from three individuals that are at very different stages of their coding journeys. Becky Hansis-O’Neill (also our co-host
• Animal Computer Interaction — You’ve heard of Human Computer Interaction (HCI), now get ready for Animal Computer Interaction (ACI). Ilyena has made a career developing computer interfaces for non-human animals. She has worked wit
• Ape Gestures — Cat observes great apes in the wild and in the lab to crack the code of their gestural communication. We discussed the challenges and benefits of studying apes in the wild vs in the lab. Cat also shar
• Evaluating AI Abilities — In this episode, Kozzy discusses his endeavors to compare the cognitive abilities of humans, animals, and AI programs. Specifically, we discussed object permanence, the ability to understand an object
• HMMs for Behavior — Théo Michelot has made a career out of tackling tough ecological questions using time-series data. How do scientists turn a series of GPS location observations over time into useful behavioral data? G
• Bioinspired Engineering — Brian Taylor shares his research on magnetoreception. Animals like birds and sea turtles use magnetoreception to use the Earth’s magnetic field for navigation, but it’s not a sense that’s well underst
• Modelling Evolution — Modeling evolutionary processes goes way beyond the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium we all learned in biology class. Natural selection comes from many sources like resources availability, mate preferences,
• Behavioral Genetics — It’s almost impossible to think about animal behavior without thinking of dogs! Our canine friends are a subspecies of wolf that has been co-evolving with us for tens of thousands of years. The transi
• Signal in the Noise — In this episode, we are joined by Barbara Webb and Anna Hadjitofi. Barbara runs the Insect Robotics lab at the University of Edinburgh, and Anna is a PhD student at the School of Informatics at the un
• Pose Tracking — Many researchers and students have painstakingly labeled precise details about the body positions of the creatures they study. Can AI be used for this labeling? Of course it can! Today's episode discu
• Modeling Group Behavior — Our guest in this episode is Sebastien Motsch, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, working in the School of Mathematical and Statistical Science. He works on modeling self-organized bi
• Advances in Data Loggers — Our guest in this episode is Ryan Hanscom. Ryan is a Ph.D. candidate in a joint doctoral evolution program at San Diego State University and the University of California, Riverside. He is a terrestria
• What You Know About Intelligence is Wrong (fixed) — We are joined by Hank Schlinger, a professor of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles. His research revolves around theoretical issues in psychology and behavioral analysis. Hank esta
• Animal Decision Making — On today’s episode, we are joined by Aimee Dunlap. Aimee is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri–St. Louis and the interim director at the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center. Aimee
• Octopus Cognition — We are joined by Tamar Gutnick, a visiting professor at the University of Naples Federico II, Napoli, Italy. She studies the octopus nervous system and their behavior, focusing on cognition and learni
• Optimal Foraging — Claire Hemmingway, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, is our guest today. Her research is on decis
• Memory in Chess — On today’s show, we are joined by our co-host, Becky Hansis-O’Neil. Becky is a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, where she studies bumblebees and tarantulas to understand their le
• OpenWorm — On this episode, we are joined by Stephen Larson, the CEO of MetaCell and an affiliate of the OpenWorm foundation. Stephen discussed what the Openworm project is about. They hope to use a digital *C.
• What the Antlion Knows — Our guest is Becky Hansis-O’Neil, a Ph.D. student at the University of Missouri, St Louis, and our co-host for the new "Animal Intelligence" season. Becky shares her background on how she got into the