2024 was a year in which I managed to read and review 38 books. What follows is my personal top 5 of the most impactful, most beautiful, and most thought-provoking books I read this year.

1. Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter

I instantly fell in love with Jay Matternes’s palaeoart when I encountered it in Visions of Lost Worlds. Science historian Richard Milner spent eight years on this fully authorised career retrospective by Abbeville Press, and it is full of mesmerising palaeo- and wildlife art by an underrecognized master of the genre. Read more…

2. Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life

I read this book as part of a still-ongoing review series. Author Jason Roberts writes an epic history of taxonomy across three centuries that charts the lives, works, and legacy of Linnaeus and Buffon. Published by Riverrun, it quickly became a personal favourite for introducing me to a new intellectual hero. Read more…

3. Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World

What a killer title. I was stoked the moment Profile Books announced this one. Fun, fascinating, and always with one eye firmly on the facts, conservation biologist and marine ecologist Joe Roman shows how animals shape ecosystems through their everyday activities. Read more…

4. Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death

Princeton University Press published this translation from the Spanish original by philosopher Susana Monsó where she provides an exceedingly interesting take on how animals understand death. Playing Possum manages to be both accessible to a general audience and relevant to specialists by showing why comparative thanatology still has a whole lot of growing up to do. Read more…

5. Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication

Zoologist Arik Kershenbaum joins Viking Books to deliver Why Animals Talk: a highly stimulating and thought-provoking exercise in decentering the human experience and trying to understand animals on their terms. Read more…

In the category “also-ran”, honorary mention goes to Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will and Alfie & Me: What Owls Know, What Humans Believe. I would have loved to include these deeply impressive books as well, except that they were technically published in 2023. If you are looking for more recommendations, do check out my earlier top 5s or browse the archive which lists all reviews.

Finally, some announcements. First, I realise the total number of books read this year is the lowest it has ever been. It is not that I am losing interest, but simply that the same processes of intensification I mentioned last year are still in effect. I am spending more time with each book, taking more notes, doing more background research, drawing on more accumulated knowledge, and writing longer reviews. Second, I intend to continue doing more two- and three-parters and go back to relevant earlier books when touching on certain topics. I hope readers are enjoying the digressions into yesteryear’s books. Once I am finally in control of my to-be-read pile, I hope to feature the occasional classic from decades ago that I keep coming across and have since acquired. Third, you might have noticed that I have abandoned certain social media platforms: their business tactics and management were becoming insufferable. I am really enjoying the crowd on Mastodon, so find me there or sign up here to get email notifications of every new review. I have also opened a Ko-fi account and would like to once again thank the readers who made some very generous donations there: you know who you are. Lastly, I would love to have your feedback! This blog has been running for over seven years now and I am only a few posts away from review #500. I am doing a fair amount of maintenance on older reviews, cleaning up broken links and streamlining the layout I have settled on. I have toyed with ideas such as audio versions of reviews, author interviews, or a newsletter. What would you like to see more or less of?

This is the second of a three-part review on acoustic communication in animals. Zoologist Arik Kershenbaum impressed me with the previously reviewed The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy. That popular work on astrobiology was a diversion from his actual research on vocal communication in animals. Rather than asking what animals are saying, Kershenbaum is foremost interested in why animals talk in the first place. How do they live, what do they need to say to each other, and are there any parallels with human language? The answers Kershenbaum presents are a highly stimulating and thought-provoking exercise in decentering the human experience and trying to understand animals on their terms.

Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication, written by Arik Kershenbaum, published in Europe by Viking Books in January 2024 (hardback, 273 pages)

Obviously, animals communicate via many more channels than just sound and Kershenbaum happily admits that each of these is worthy of their own book. He focuses on vocal communication both because sound is a very useful medium, and because it interests us as a vocal species ourselves. He further narrows down his approach by discussing six animal species: wolves, dolphins (the subject of many misconceptions), parrots, hyraxes (which look like rodents but are related to elephants), gibbons, and chimpanzees. As alluded to above, the core idea propelling this book is that “why animals need to talk is the important question to ask before we can answer how and what animals are saying” (p. 14). What these six species share is that they are highly social and negotiate their social environment using complex communication. Though Kershenbaum promises to put the animals first and the science second, I found his take on the science to make for a particularly captivating book. How so? Well…

First, he stresses the importance of studying animals in the wild, in the natural environment they evolved in. This is hard and time-consuming work and the literature on e.g. hyraxes and gibbons is rather limited, while that on wolves risks being biased by the preponderance of research done in Yellowstone National Park. Our knowledge of parrots is coloured by their popularity as pets, whereas their communal lives in the wild are rather different. Only chimpanzees can be said to be intensively studied in the wild. Kershenbaum’s conviction is that “we can’t understand animal communication without understanding animal societies” (p. 10). Each chapter therefore furnishes you with the basics of their communication—the howls of wolves, the whistles of dolphins, the squawks and whistles of parrots, the multisyllabic songs of hyraxes and gibbons, and the many grunts and hoots of chimpanzees—and how these grease the wheels of their social interactions.

“the core idea propelling this book is that “why animals need to talk is the important question to ask before we can answer how and what animals are saying” (p. 14).”

Closely related to this is the question of what can be learned from the various attempts at teaching animals human language, such as Irene Pepperberg’s work with the African grey parrot , dogs such as Chaser, or decades of experiments with primates. Though some animals show impressive linguistic capabilities, the amount of training required is often extraordinary. The conceptual flaw with such research is that you are training animals to understand human words, ultimately revealing more about our than their language. In the chapter on dolphins, Kershenbaum pointedly asks: “Why should dolphins have a language just like ours? Are human languages really the template for the way that animal communication must work?” (p. 75).

This brings me to the idea that I consider to be the showstopper of the book. To really understand animal communication means kissing goodbye to the human-centric notion of words. “Just because we’ve developed a language based on distinct words doesn’t mean that is how others must communicate” (p. 74). Kershenbaum hammers home this message explicitly in the chapters on wolves, dolphins, hyraxes, and gibbons. What these species share is that there rarely is a one-to-one relationship between a sound and a concept. Even alarm calls warning of predators vary in some species. The six animals explored here use vocal communication to “relate to emotional states, rather than intellectual ones” (p. 241). Thus, there is no dictionary to draw up, no key or cypher to find to “crack the code”. He is sceptical of recent attempts that throw deep-learning algorithms, neural networks, or artificial intelligence at the problem. We should focus on understanding the animals first, “rather than hoping for human-like information, and searching doggedly for what we want to find” (p. 77). Wrapping your head around this one is an exercise in decentering the human experience.

“To really understand animal communication means kissing goodbye to the human-centric notion of words.”

It should be evident by now that there is an anti-anthropocentric streak running through this book. But next to the usual “humans are not the pinnacle of evolution” sentiment espoused by biologists, he also objects to the idea that animals converse with each other like humans but in their own languages. This is just anthropocentrism in reverse that still takes the human experience as the universal yardstick. Kershenbaum instead explodes the idea: animals do not have human-like language because they have no need to. “Nothing about the behaviour of wolves or dolphins or even humpbacks gives any indication that having a language like ours would be useful to them” (p. 243). While this may sound controversial, examining the details of their lives reveals that, compared to the open-ended language of humans, “the amount of information they need to convey to each other is, in most cases, limited” (p. 235). Though we find elements of linguistic ability scattered all over the animal world, no other species combines these as we do. Kershenbaum admits that human language^[1] really does seem to be unique, or rather uniquely weird. “It’s almost as if words were an afterthought, an embellishment on communication. Unnecessary glitter attached to the ordinary kind of signals that animals send to each other all the time” (p. 219). I am going to invoke what I wrote elsewhere about Justin Gregg’s book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal. Rather than concluding that human-like language does not readily evolve, maybe we should conclude that it readily does not evolve. Gregg argued along the same lines when he concluded that most animals seem to be getting by just fine without evolving human-like intelligence.

Whereas the previously reviewed The Voices of Nature wandered widely through the noisy realms of bioacoustics and suffered slightly in its organisation, Why Animals Talk is a more focused affair that organises its contents in each chapter with helpful subheadings. Mathevon only touched on the question of whether animals have a language in his final chapter, making this the perfect follow-up. While the biological details are interesting by themselves, what elevates this book is how Kershenbaum forces you to rethink linguistic concepts you have always taken for granted so that you may understand animals on their terms, not ours. In the process, he throws out as many unanswered questions as he provides insightful answers to others. Needless to say, I found Why Animals Talk to be an incredibly captivating and stimulating book.

Of course, discussing acoustic communication in animals would not be complete without considering humans. Join me as I next turn to Shane O’Mara’s Talking Heads.

1. ↑ Some readers might be frustrated by Kershenbaum’s refusal to provide a formal definition of language. This is not an oversight, but a conscious decision that he defends by pointing out the lack of a universally agreed-upon definition.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Why Animals Talk

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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On account of our good eyesight, humans are said to be a visual species. However, when you stop and think about it, human language (at least English) has a surprisingly large vocabulary for the squawks, grunts, chirps, honks, growls, etc. that other animals make. What, if anything, are they saying? Two recent books delve into this question, The Voices of Nature and Why Animals Talk. A last-minute entry on human language, Talking Heads, turns this into a three-part review. In other words, we need to talk…

The Voices of Nature: How and Why Animals Communicate, written by Nicolas Mathevon, published by Princeton University Press in August 2023 (hardback, 375 pages)

This book was originally published in French in 2021 as Les Animaux Parlent: Sachons les Écouter by HumenSciences who also translated it into English. Their translation leaves intact the character of the book, including frequent exhortations aimed at the reader that somehow feel very French to me. None other than ecoacoustics legend Bernie Krause contributes a foreword. Author Nicolas Mathevon is currently a professor of neuroscience and animal behaviour at the University of Saint-Etienne. For over three decades, he has focused on bioacoustics, the study of animal and human acoustic communication, and from 2017 to 2023 he was president of the International Bioacoustics Society.

The Voices of Nature gives a wide-ranging overview of current themes and questions in the field, as well as a first-hand account of the laboratory research and fieldwork Mathevon and his colleagues have been getting up to. He opens, sensibly, with an introduction to Nikolaas Tinbergen’s four questions that motivate ethological research, as well as the basic physics of acoustics. The book-proper covers a plethora of topics of which I can only discuss a few examples in more detail.

Anybody who has ever watched a documentary on nesting seabirds might wonder: how do parents relocate their chicks amidst the incessant din of dense breeding colonies? This touches on the more general question of how communication works against a background of noise. Mathevon describes how biologists have adopted Claude Shannon‘s mathematical theory of communication. Originally aimed at limiting the impact of noise on telecommunication signals, it proposes three strategies that are also adopted by animals. One, increase information redundancy by repeating your message. Research on king penguins shows a linear relationship between wind speed (and thus noise) and how often they repeat their multisyllabic calls. Two, increase signal strength by talking louder and, three, change frequency to avoid noise-filled channels. Both of these are famously observed in birds singing both louder and at a higher pitch in urban environments, but acoustic adaptations to human noise are widespread.

“how do [nesting seabirds] relocate their chicks amidst the incessant din of dense breeding colonies? This touches on the more general question of how communication works against a background of noise.”

Another particularly interesting chapter deals with the evolution of communication, discussing two models of how signals evolve. The precursor sender model is a case of exaptation: existing behaviours or structures are turned into new communication signals. For example fish, that, in the absence of vocal cords, turn their swim bladder into a vibrating sound box. The sensory bias model proposes that senders exploit a sensitivity in the receiver. For example, female crickets freeze in response to high-pitched bat calls. Male crickets have started to exploit this by emitting their own high-pitched calls, making it easier to locate females. Next, the huge diversity of acoustic signals in nature can be explained by a plethora of mechanisms: sexual selection, kin selection, ecological selection, etc. Sometimes, however, it is a side-effect of other evolutionary scenarios. You are familiar with the adaptive radiation of Darwin’s finches that resulted in species with different beak shapes. But did you know that this affected their songs as well? Larger-beaked species have simpler songs as their muscles simply cannot move their beaks fast enough to produce the sorts of rapid modulations heard in smaller-beaked species.

A final interesting topic was already touched on in my previous review of Of Cockroaches and Crickets: ecoacoustics. Mathevon profiles Bernie Krause who has spent decades recording environmental soundscapes and is one of the pioneers of the discipline of ecoacoustics or soundscape ecology. Rather than listening to the vocalisations of one species, he has been listening to the totality of our world’s sound as produced by (non)human animals and natural forces (its biophony, anthropophony, and geophony). He has convincingly shown how these soundscapes are a measure of ecosystem health and are increasingly simplifying, changing, and disappearing due to human encroachment. Mathevon discusses some of the theoretical underpinnings of Krause’s idea of how and why soundscapes are structured. First is the acoustic niche hypothesis. Look at a soundscape spectrogram and you will notice how animals vocalize at different pitches, avoiding overlap. You can cut that pie in many different ways though. Acoustic overlap can also be avoided by being active at different times, or, where species do overlap, by unique rhythms. A second hypothesis is that of acoustic adaptation: the idea that sound signals are optimized for transmission in an animal’s habitat. Experimental support for this is mixed, and it seems trade-offs result in sound signals not always having the optimal acoustic characteristics.

“Some of the behaviours and adaptations described here delighted me, serving as powerful reminders that we underestimate animals, and that evolution comes up with ingenious solutions to the challenges animals face.”

There are many, many other topics and experiments that Mathevon discusses here, such as acoustic communication in birds (primarily to attract mates and defend territories), crocodiles (the social life of reptiles is underappreciated and includes acoustic communication), and underwater (including vocal dialects in various cetaceans). He discusses how vocalisations are produced and heard, how individuals learn to vocalize, how vocalizations express emotions, and how some species communicate by infrasound, ultrasound, or ground-borne vibrations. He explores how vocalisations are uttered between parents and offspring, in competition for partners, and in the real-world setting of complex social networks, rather than the sender-receiver dyads that are easier to study and interpret. Finally, he explains his arguments for saying that animals have a language, many languages in fact, even if none seem to reach the sophistication of human language.

This brings me to some criticism. First is the book’s somewhat haphazard structure. The discipline of ethology has been shaped by Tinbergen’s four “why” questions that deal with mechanism, adaptation, ontogeny, and phylogeny. In other words, how is a behaviour executed, what is its adaptive value, how does it develop during an organism’s lifetime, and how has it evolved over the generations? Mathevon dutifully introduces this legacy and for a moment I thought he would use it to structure the book. Though he refers to them where appropriate, the only line through these chapters that I could discover is Mathevon’s direct or indirect involvement in almost all the research discussed here (which, let me be clear, is a staggering achievement). Similarly, each chapter typically discusses four to six ideas and studies in a solid block of text, so could have done with breaking up using subheadings or even just decorative section breaks. My second point is that the book would have benefited from some diagrams. He now resorts to wordy descriptions of spectrograms of bird calls or of anatomical features (e.g. the proposed closed-circuit system that allows cetaceans to vocalise underwater without coming up for air). Quick point of clarification: the included illustrations by Mathevon’s father Bernard Mathevon are all animal portraits.

These are admittedly minor points that did not take away from me enjoying this book tremendously. The Voices of Nature is an immersive sonic journey, led by a tour guide with extensive knowledge of the subject. Some of the behaviours and adaptations described here delighted me, serving as powerful reminders that we underestimate animals, and that evolution comes up with ingenious solutions to the challenges animals face. Mathevon’s involvement with much of the research discussed here means he livens up the narrative with personal highs and lows, as well as the rare reveals of the practicalities of investigating animal behaviour. The level of technical detail is just right, he knows when to pull back and ends many chapters by highlighting how there is much more he could discuss. On that note, join me as I next turn to Why Animals Talk to see what Kershenbaum adds to the topic.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

The Voices of Nature

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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Of all the insects that have a PR problem, cockroaches must rank very high. That, however, did not stop German entomologist, journalist, and filmmaker Frank Nischk from spending a year-long internship studying them. In this book, he regales the reader with stories of his time in the lab and the field studying first cockroaches and later crickets. A light and breezy read despite the serious undercurrent of biodiversity decline, Of Cockroaches and Crickets turned out to be an entertaining read.

Of Cockroaches and Crickets: Learning to Love Creatures That Skitter and Jump, written by Frank Nischk, published by Greystone Books in March 2023 (hardback, 214 pages)

This book was originally published in German in 2020 as Die fabelhafte Welt der fiesen Tiere by Ludwig Buchverlag and has been translated into English by Jane Billinghurst who frequently works with Greystone Books. Carl Safina contributes a short foreword that cracked me up and immediately set the tone. The book is effectively a memoir of Nischk’s early years studying for his undergraduate and doctorate degrees in the mid-nineties, told in 18 short chapters in two parts. His subsequent career pivot to documentary filmmaking only receives passing mention.

Given Nischk’s concern about biodiversity decline, and his desire to communicate to a broad audience why insects are fascinating and important, there is an irony to his undergraduate internship. He spent a year in the lab of Martin Dambach studying the aggregation behaviour of the German cockroach, Blattella germanica. By day, large groups of them bed down on their own excrement, likely attracted by pheromones released by the faeces. The irony? Nischk’s internship was funded by biotechnology giant Bayer which was hoping to isolate the chemicals responsible for putting the cockroaches in sleep mode to develop a pheromone-based cockroach trap: “the exterminator’s holy grail” (p. 25).

For his subsequent doctoral studies, Nischk got his conservation priorities in order. Staying with Dambach, he turned to crickets and spent time in Ecuador recording their songs. Next to discovering species new to science, this is his entry into the fascinating field of soundscape ecology or ecoacoustics. A small cadre of ecologists has been recording soundscapes of natural habitats. Bernie Krause (not mentioned here) is one particularly well-known example. By comparing recordings made years or decades apart they have shown how natural soundscapes are changing and often disappearing due to human encroachment. Others are hoping to train software to analyze recordings and identify species by their calls. If scaled up, the dream is to have passive acoustic monitoring stations in biodiversity hotspots around the globe.

“For his subsequent doctoral studies, Nischk […] spent time in Ecuador recording [cricket] songs. Next to discovering species new to science, this is his entry into the fascinating field of soundscape ecology.”

This backbone of his research is livened up with personal anecdotes and interesting asides. A friend’s call about a wasp infestation in her kitchen drawer is an excuse to introduce the 18th-century French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre who was one of the first European naturalists to systematically collect and study butterflies, beetles, and wasps. Getting stung by a bullet ant in the rainforest of Ecuador leads to an aside about the late entomologist Justin O. Schmidt, the man who got stung for science (and wrote a fine book about it too). Tracking down a particularly loud cricket in Ecuador is the starting point for an unusual case where entomologists helped to defuse international political tensions between the USA and Cuba (this story has a surprising twist that I will not spoil here). A botched attempt to eradicate cockroaches that escape his experimental setup backfires most spectacularly, while fieldwork in the tropics is always fodder for amusing cultural misunderstandings and sober reflections. There is a nice mix here that never dwells on any one topic too long and makes for a book that is hard to put down.

The third and final part is, perhaps surprisingly, comparatively the weakest of the book. In four chapters Nischk muses on the biodiversity crisis, particularly the still poorly understood decline of insects, and discusses examples of individuals and organisations who are creating and protecting wildlife habitat. Probably most interesting are the little-known grassroots initiatives in Ecuador that are undertaken by villagers and farmers turning to ecotourism. But is this really the answer? Or does it merely perpetuate the idea that nature can only be protected if it has monetary value? You will not find a critical or comprehensive analysis of wildlife conservation here. There is also an odd focus on projects in the USA, e.g. the High Line in New York, the Xerces Society, Joan Maloof’s Old-Growth Forest Network, and the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. I wonder if this was added for the English translation. There is no mention of e.g. the European Natura 2000 network of protected areas or E.O. Wilson’s bold call to protect half the planet, and only passing mention of the German environmental organisation NABU or the practice of rewilding. Putting aside such nitpicking, none of this takes away from his genuine concern about the ongoing loss of biodiversity nor from his conclusion that the key to protecting species is protecting their habitat.

Overall, Of Cockroaches and Crickets is an amusing and light read that I devoured in a day. Nischk offers a nicely balanced blend of interesting natural history, amusing personal stories, and captivating scientific research. Whether it is flies, wasps, or rats, we need more books that celebrate those species we all too readily dismiss as pests.

Disclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however.

Of Cockroaches and Crickets

Other recommended books mentioned in this review:

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