动物感知世界的奇怪而秘密的方式

The Strange and Secret Ways That Animals Perceive the World


我们才刚刚开始了解非人类生物的感官。如果我们能理解它们，它们会告诉我们什么？

Nonhuman creatures have senses that we’re just beginning to fathom. What would they tell us if we could only understand them?

近60年前的一个晚上，塔夫茨大学一位名叫罗杰·佩恩的研究人员正在实验室里工作，他听到了关于一条被冲上附近海滩的鲸鱼的广播报道。尽管那是一个寒冷而潮湿的三月夜晚，他还是决定驱车到岸边。当他到达时，他发现这头鲸鱼已被肢解。两个路人在它的侧腹上刻下了他们名字的首字母。有人砍掉了它的胁腹，另一个人（也许是同一个人）在它的鼻孔里塞了一个雪茄烟头。佩恩在雨中站了很久，凝视着这具尸体。他一直在研究飞蛾，现在他决定把注意力转移到鲸类动物上。

One evening almost sixty years ago, a Tufts University researcher named Roger Payne was working in his lab when he heard a radio report about a whale that had washed up on a beach nearby. Although it was a cold, wet March night, he decided to drive to the shore. When he arrived, he discovered that the animal had been mutilated. Two passersby had carved their initials in its flanks. Someone had hacked off its flukes, and another person, or perhaps the same one, had stuck a cigar butt in its blowhole. Payne stood in the rain for a long time, gazing at the corpse. He had been studying moths; now he decided to switch his attention to cetaceans.

除了那条死去的鲸鱼，佩恩从未真正见过鲸鱼，也不知道哪里可以观察到鲸鱼。在一个熟人的建议下，他来到了百慕大。在那里，他遇到了一位曾为美国海军工作的工程师，他通过安装在海岸边的麦克风监测苏联的潜艇。在监听敌方潜艇的时候，这位工程师偶然发现了其他海底声音。他向佩恩播放了其中一些声音的磁带，佩恩后来回忆说：“我听到的东西让我大吃一惊”。
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Aside from the dead one, Payne had never actually seen a whale, nor did he know where whales could be observed. At the suggestion of an acquaintance, he made his way to Bermuda. There he met an engineer who had worked for the United States Navy, monitoring Soviet submarines via microphones installed off the coast. While listening for enemy subs, the engineer had chanced upon other undersea sounds. He played a tape of some of them to Payne, who later recalled, “What I heard blew my mind.”

佩恩带着这盘磁带的拷贝回家了。工程师确定，这些声音是座头鲸发出的，从令人联想到犹太教法器的哀鸣到类似小猪叫声的高亢叫声不等。佩恩发现这盘磁带令人着迷，他听了数百次。最后，他恍然大悟，他所听的东西有一个结构。
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Payne took a copy of the tape home with him. The sounds—made, the engineer had determined, by humpback whales—ranged from mournful wails that evoked the call of a shofar to high-pitched cries that resembled the squeals of piglets. Payne found the tape mesmerizing and listened to it hundreds of times. Finally, it dawned on him that what he was listening to had a structure.

在一台叫做声谱仪的机器的帮助下，佩恩将磁带上的声音转换成一系列方格状的符号。这项工作花了几年时间，但最终证实了他的怀疑。座头鲸总是以一种特定的顺序发出哀号、尖叫和咕哝声——A、B、C、D、E，而不是佩恩所构想的A、B、D、C、E。他宣布其发现的论文发表在1971年夏天的《科学》杂志上。佩恩写道：“座头鲸在7至30分钟的时间里发出一系列美妙而多样的声音，然后相当精确地重复同样的系列”。他认为，每一个系列都是一首“歌曲”。

With the help of a machine called a sound spectrograph, Payne converted the voices on the tape into a series of squiggle-like notations. The exercise took years, but eventually it confirmed what he had suspected. The humpbacks always made their wails, squeals, and grunts in a particular order—A, B, C, D, E and never A, B, D, C, E, in Payne’s formulation. The paper in which he announced his discovery appeared in Science in the summer of 1971. “Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) produce a series of beautiful and varied sounds for a period of 7 to 30 minutes and then repeat the same series with considerable precision,” Payne wrote. Each series, he argued, qualified as a “song.”

在论文写作过程中，佩恩安排将座头鲸的歌曲作为一张唱片发行。这张专辑在公告牌排行榜上停留了几个星期，并售出了十多万张。正如一位评论家所指出的那样，对于“没有音乐家、没有歌词、没有可舞动的节拍、实际上也没有歌手的作品来说，这是一个特别令人印象深刻的成就。(座头鲸不具备声带；它们通过鼻腔将空气推出来发声）”。座头鲸激发了许多陆上表演者的灵感；朱迪·柯林斯将它们的一些叫声纳入她的专辑《鲸鱼和夜莺》；皮特·西格写了《世界上最后一条鲸鱼之歌》；纽约爱乐乐团演奏了《上帝创造了伟大的鲸鱼》，这是一首由艾伦·霍夫哈内斯创作的作品。

While the paper was in the works, Payne arranged to have the humpbacks’ songs released as an LP. The album spent several weeks on the Billboard 200 and sold more than a hundred thousand copies. This was a particularly impressive feat, as one commentator noted, for a “work with no musicians, no lyrics, no danceable beats and actually no singers either. (Humpback whales do not possess vocal cords; they make sound by their pushing air out through their nasal cavities.)” The humpbacks inspired many terrestrial performers; Judy Collins incorporated some of their calls into her album “Whales and Nightingales”; Pete Seeger wrote “Song of the World’s Last Whale”; and the New York Philharmonic played “And God Created Great Whales,” a piece composed by Alan Hovhaness.

1977年，当美国国家航空航天局发射旨在探测太阳系远处的旅行者1号和2号时，座头鲸的歌声也随之而来。该机构为每艘飞船配备了一张“黄金唱片”，任何碰巧拦截到它的外星人都可以用宝石唱针（也包括在内）播放。录音中包含了55种语言的问候——“来自地球上的孩子们的问候”，以及来自佩恩的一首鲸鱼歌曲。

In 1977, when nasa launched Voyagers 1 and 2, designed to probe the far reaches of the solar system, the songs of the humpbacks went with them. The agency outfitted each craft with a “golden record” that could be played using a stylus (also included) by any alien who happened to intercept it. The recording featured greetings in fifty-five languages—“Hello from the children of planet Earth,” the English speaker said—as well as a sequence from one of Payne’s whales.

在旅行者号出发的时候，没有人知道这些座头鲸想要表达什么，如果真的有的话。今天，这些探测器距离地球已经超过100亿英里，但仍然没有人知道。但人们一直抱有希望。

At the time the Voyagers set out, no one knew what, if anything, the humpbacks were trying to convey. Today, the probes are more than ten billion miles from Earth, and still no one knows. But people keep hoping.

想象一下下面的场景。你和一只猫头鹰、一只蝙蝠、一只老鼠、一只蜘蛛、一只蚊子和一条响尾蛇共处于一个房间里。突然，所有的灯都熄灭了。你没有掏出手机打电话给灭虫专家，而是花了点时间来思考这个情况。你意识到，蝙蝠在导航方面没有问题，因为它依靠回声定位。猫头鹰有很好的听力，它可以在黑暗中找到老鼠。响尾蛇也可以，它可以探测到啮齿动物发出的热量。蜘蛛同样不受停电的影响，因为它通过振动来感知世界。蚊子跟随你发出的二氧化碳，落在你的小腿上。你试图拍打它，但由于你如此依赖视觉，你错过了它，结果却踩到了响尾蛇。

Imagine the following scene: You are in a room with an owl, a bat, a mouse, a spider, a mosquito, and a rattlesnake. Suddenly, all the lights go off. Instead of pulling out your phone to call an exterminator, you take a moment to ponder the situation. The bat, you realize, is having no trouble navigating, since it relies on echolocation. The owl has such good hearing that it can find the mouse in the dark. So can the rattlesnake, which detects the heat that the rodent is giving off. The spider is similarly unfazed by the blackout, because it senses the world through vibrations. The mosquito follows the carbon dioxide you’re emitting and lands on your shin. You try to swat it away, but because you’re so dependent on vision you miss it and instead end up stepping on the rattler.

《大西洋》杂志的科学作家艾德·杨在他的新书《一个巨大的世界：动物的感官如何揭示我们周围的隐秘领域》中，以这个思想实验的某一个版本作为开篇。（他的版本还包括一只知更鸟、一头大象和一只大黄蜂，尽管没有与蛇发生潜在的致命性接触）。杨对动物可能与我们交流的内容感兴趣，也就是说，它们能感知到什么。他指出，人类是以一种方式看待世界的。其他物种通过非常不同的眼睛来看待它，许多物种根本不看它。试图用一种世界观——或者用杨喜欢的术语“客观世界”——来替代另一种世界观可能会令人沮丧，但是，他认为，这正是这种努力的价值所在。它提醒我们，“对于我们所有吹嘘的智慧”，我们的“客观世界”只是万千世界的一个。

Ed Yong, a science writer for The Atlantic, opens his new book, “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us” (Random House), with a version of this thought experiment. (His version also includes a robin, an elephant, and a bumblebee, though not the potentially fatal encounter with the snake.) Yong is interested in what animals might communicate to us if they could, which is to say, what they perceive. Humans, he points out, see the world one way. Other species see it through very different eyes, and many don’t see it at all. Attempting to exchange one world view—or, to use the term Yong favors, Umwelt—for another may be frustrating, but, he argues, that’s what makes the effort worthwhile. It reminds us that, “for all our vaunted intelligence,” our Umwelt is just one among millions.

想想看扇贝。（超市鱼类柜台上出售的只是扇贝用来打开和关闭其外壳的肌肉；整个扇贝就像一个煎蛋）。有些种类的扇贝有几十只眼睛；有些则有几百只。它们里面是由微小晶体组成的镜子，将光线聚焦到视网膜上，这是真正的视网膜，因为每只眼睛有两个。扇贝的眼睛排列在其身体的边缘，就像狗项圈上的尖刺。
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Consider the scallop. (What’s sold at the supermarket fish counter is just the muscle that scallops use to open and close their shells; the entire animal resembles a fried egg.) Some species of scallop have dozens of eyes; others have hundreds. Inside them are mirrors, composed of tiny crystals, that focus light onto the retina—retinas, really, since each eye has two. A scallop’s eyes are arrayed around the edge of its body, like spikes on a dog collar.

我们的大脑将两只眼睛收集的信息合并成一个单一的图像。扇贝有几十只（或几百只）眼睛，面临着更严峻的挑战。但它们没有太多的脑力投入到这项任务中。（事实上，它们没有大脑。) 为了弄清楚扇贝用它们所有的眼球在做什么，南卡罗来纳大学的生物学家丹尼尔·斯皮泽开发了一个实验，他称之为扇贝电视。他把这些动物绑在小基座上，把它们放在电脑显示器前，强迫它们观看漂流颗粒的图像。扇贝是滤食性动物，这意味着它们食用从水中滤出的浮游生物。斯皮泽发现，如果计算机生成的颗粒足够大，而且移动速度足够慢，扇贝就会打开它们的外壳。他告诉杨：“看到所有的扇贝同时打开和关闭，令人兴奋，也很令人毛骨悚然”。他认为，它们的眼睛是独立运作的，就像运动探测器。当一只眼睛感觉到有什么潜在的美味时，它就会发出信号进行调查。杨指出，如果斯皮泽是正确的，那么即使扇贝的眼睛既多又复杂，这些动物也不具备我们所认为的视觉。他写道，它们看到的是“无景之景”。

Our brains combine the information gathered by our two eyes into a single image. With dozens (or hundreds) of eyes, scallops face a steeper challenge. But they don’t have much brainpower to devote to the task. (In fact, they don’t have brains.) In an effort to figure out what the scallops were doing with all their eyeballs, Daniel Speiser, a biologist at the University of South Carolina, developed an experiment he called Scallop TV. He strapped the animals onto little pedestals, planted them in front of a computer monitor, and forced them to watch images of drifting particles. Scallops are filter feeders, meaning that they consume plankton they strain out of the water. Speiser found that if the computer-generated particles were big enough and were moving slowly enough the scallops would open their shells. “It’s wild and creepy to see all of them opening and closing at the same time,” he tells Yong. He thinks that their eyes function independently, like motion detectors. When one eye senses something potentially tasty, it sends a signal to investigate. If Speiser is correct, Yong notes, then even though scallops’ eyes are both numerous and complex, the animals don’t possess what we would think of as vision. They see, he writes, “without scenes.”

“一个巨大的世界”充满了像扇贝这样的奇怪生物和像扇贝电视这样的奇怪实验。海豹有一圈从它们的鼻子和眉毛中伸出来的、对振动敏感的胡须。为了测量这些胡须有多敏感，德国罗斯托克大学的一个海洋生物学家小组训练两只港海豹跟踪一艘微型潜水艇的路径。然后他们把动物的眼睛蒙上，堵住它们的耳朵。为了研究飞蛾如何躲避蝙蝠，博伊西州立大学的科学家们剪掉了一些飞蛾的尾巴，并为其他飞蛾安装了假的翅膀延长件。为了确定寄居蟹是否会感到疼痛，贝尔法斯特女王大学的一对研究人员用电击来刺激它们，为了弄清乌贼的情况，旧金山州立大学的生物学家用手术刀切开了它们。当我碰到凯西的故事时，一只瓶鼻海豚拒绝戴上研究人员想让它戴的阻隔声音的面具，我默默地为它欢呼。

“An Immense World” is filled with strange creatures like scallops and strange experiments like Scallop TV. Harbor seals have a fringe of vibration-sensitive whiskers jutting from their snouts and eyebrows. To gauge how sensitive the whiskers are, a team of marine biologists at the University of Rostock, in Germany, trained two harbor seals to follow the path of a miniature submarine. Then they blindfolded the animals and plugged their ears. To study how moths elude bats, scientists at Boise State University cut off some moths’ tails and fitted out others with fake wing extensions. To ascertain whether hermit crabs experience pain, a pair of researchers at Queen’s University Belfast prodded them with electric shocks, and to figure out the same thing for squid a biologist at San Francisco State sliced them with scalpels. When I got to the story of Kathy, a bottlenose dolphin who refused to don a sound-blocking mask that researchers wanted her to wear, I silently cheered for her.

黑色幽灵鱼（线翎电鳗），正如它的名字所暗示的那样，是一个夜间的猎手。通过发射其尾部的一个特殊器官，刀鱼会产生一个电场，像光环一样环绕着它。嵌入其皮肤的感受器使它能够探测到附近任何导电的东西，包括其他生物体。一位研究人员向杨指出，这种被称为主动电定位的感知模式类似于感知冷热。另一位研究人员认为，这就像触摸东西，只是没有接触。不过，没有人能够真正说清楚，因为人类缺乏电器官和电感受器。西北大学的生物医学工程教授马尔科姆·麦基弗问道：“谁知道鱼是什么样子的？”

The black ghost knifefish is, as its name implies, a nocturnal hunter. By firing a specialized organ in its tail, a knifefish creates an electric field that surrounds it like an aura. Receptors embedded in its skin then enable it to detect anything nearby that conducts electricity, including other organisms. One researcher suggests to Yong that this mode of perception, known as active electrolocation, is analogous to sensing hot and cold. Another posits that it’s like touching something, only without making contact. No one can really say, though, since humans lack both electric organs and electroreceptors. “Who knows what it’s like for the fish?” Malcolm MacIver, a professor of biomedical engineering at Northwestern, asks.

这个问题最著名的迭代来自哲学家托马斯·纳格尔在1974年发表的文章《做一只蝙蝠是什么感觉》。纳格尔指出，蝙蝠与人类关系密切，我们认为它们有能力获得我们称之为经验的东西。但我们如何才能进入它们毛茸茸的小脑袋里？困难不仅仅在于它们不能告诉我们。而是它们的“客观环境”对我们而言完全是陌生的。
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The most famous iteration of this question comes from the essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?,” published in 1974 by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Bats are closely enough related to humans, Nagel noted, that we believe them capable of what we’d call experience. But how can we get inside their furry little heads? The difficulty is not just that they can’t tell us. It’s that their Umwelt is utterly foreign.

纳格尔写道，人们可以试着想象，“一个人的视力很差，通过反射的高频声音信号系统来感知周围的世界”，或者“一个人的手臂上有蹼，这使他能够在黄昏和黎明时分飞来飞去，用嘴捕捉昆虫。”但这并没有什么帮助。

One might try to imagine, Nagel wrote, “that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals,” or that “one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth.” But that wouldn’t help much.

“我想知道一只蝙蝠是什么样子的，”纳格尔坚持说道：“然而，如果我试图想象这一点，我就会被限制在我自己的思维资源中，而这些资源是不充分的。”他总结说，“作为一只蝙蝠是什么样的？”这个问题人们永远无法回答；它“超出了我们的想象能力”。

“I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” Nagel insisted. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate.” The question “What is it like to be a bat?,” he concluded, is one that people will never answer; it lies “beyond our ability to conceive.”

杨对在他的文章中多次出现的纳格尔的回应是“是的，但是……”。是的，我们永远无法知道蝙蝠是什么样子的（或者黑色幽灵鱼是什么样子的）。但是我们可以学到其他很多关于回声定位和电定位以及动物用来感知周围环境的方法。而这种体验，对我们来说，是一种心灵的拓展。杨采访了克里斯托弗·克拉克，他是康奈尔大学的研究人员，在19世纪70年代与罗杰·佩恩合作，倾听鲸鱼的声音。鲸鱼的歌声位于光谱的另一端，与蝙蝠的叫声相反；它们的频率很低，可以传播很远的距离。如果鲸鱼用它们的歌声相互交流，它们不仅是跨越空间，而且是跨越时间。一头在百慕大附近的座头鲸发出的叫声，需要20分钟才能到达在新斯科舍海岸边游泳的座头鲸那里。如果加拿大的鲸鱼立即回答，那么在百慕大的鲸鱼听到回音之前，将过去40分钟。克拉克说：要想象鲸鱼是什么样子，“你必须把你的思维延伸到完全不同的维度”。
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Yong’s response to Nagel, who makes several appearances in his pages, runs along the lines of “Yes, but . . .” Yes, we can never know what it’s like for a bat to be a bat (or for a knifefish to be a knifefish). But we can learn a lot about echolocation and electrolocation and the many other methods that animals use to sense their surroundings. And this experience is, for us, mind-expanding. Yong speaks to Christopher Clark, a Cornell researcher who in the nineteen-seventies worked with Roger Payne, listening for whales. Whale songs lie at the opposite end of the spectrum from bat calls; they are very low frequency and can travel vast distances. If whales are using their songs to communicate with one another, they are doing so not just across space but also across time. A call made by a humpback near Bermuda would take twenty minutes to reach a humpback swimming off the coast of Nova Scotia. If the Canadian whale answered immediately, it would be forty minutes before the Bermuda whale heard back. To imagine what it’s like to be a whale, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark says.

同时，你不必了解蝙蝠是什么样子的，就能体会到什么可能会扰乱蝙蝠的生存方式。杨与博伊西州立大学的生物学家杰西·巴伯一起在大提顿国家公园进行夜间访问。巴伯关注的是被称为“感官污染”的东西。即使在提顿地区，现在灯光也照亮了黑暗地带。昆虫被吸引到灯光下；蝙蝠被昆虫所吸引；而且，令人发愁的是猫头鹰会把蝙蝠叼走。为了验证这一假设，巴伯和他的学生们花了一晚上的时间在一个露营地的停车场标记蝙蝠。巴伯抱怨说，这个停车场“亮得像个沃尔玛，因为没有人想到对野生动物的影响”。

Meanwhile, you don’t have to understand what it’s like for a bat to be a bat to appreciate what might mess with a bat’s way of being. Yong pays a nighttime visit to Grand Teton National Park with Jesse Barber, a biologist at Boise State University. Barber is concerned about what’s become known as “sensory pollution.” Even in the Tetons, lights now illuminate the darkness. Insects are drawn to the lights; bats are attracted to the insects; and, the worry is, owls pick off the bats. To test this hypothesis, Barber and his students spend the night tagging bats in a campground parking lot. The lot, Barber complains, is “lit up like a Walmart because no one thought about the implications for wildlife.”

杨希望我们更多地思考这些影响，而这些影响会扰乱整个生态系统。他提供了伍德豪斯灌丛鸦的例子，它们原产于美国西部和墨西哥中部。这些鸟对皮诺松的生存非常重要，因为它们传播了树木的种子。但是它们被压缩机的噪音所困扰，所以它们会避开正在开采天然气的地方。研究人员发现，在鸟类仍能获得安宁的地方，皮诺松树苗比鸟类放弃的嘈杂地区要常见四倍。

Yong wants us to think more about these implications, which can upset entire ecosystems. He offers the example of Woodhouse’s scrub jays, which are native to the western United States and central Mexico. The birds are important to the survival of piñon pines because they spread the trees’ seeds. But they’re bothered by the noise of compressors, so they avoid spots where natural gas is being extracted. Researchers found that, where the jays still find quiet, piñon-pine seedlings are four times more common than in noisy areas the birds have abandoned.

杨写道：“通过几个世纪的努力，人们已经对其他物种的感官世界有了很多了解。但仅仅在其中一小部分时间里，我们就已经颠覆了这些世界”。

“Through centuries of effort, people have learned much about the sensory worlds of other species,” Yong writes. “But in a fraction of the time, we have upended those worlds.”

2015年9月，一位名叫汤姆·穆斯蒂尔的英国纪录片导演与一位朋友在加州度假时，两人决定在蒙特利湾进行一次皮划艇旅行。这次旅行的目的是为了近距离观察鲸鱼，但穆斯蒂尔和他的朋友得到了比他们所期望的更多。在他们划船的时候，一只座头鲸从离他们的船不远的水面上跃了出来。（穆斯蒂尔后来把这种经历比作观看航天飞机起飞。） 这头鲸鱼重达30吨，从他们身旁落下来。两名皮划艇运动员连同他们的船都被吸了下去。穆斯蒂尔认为他被撕碎了，并将他没有感觉到疼痛归因于受到了惊吓。但他和他的朋友都完好无损地重新浮出水面。他们上了岸，租给他们皮划艇的公司为他们提供了免费的热巧克力。

In September, 2015, a British documentary filmmaker named Tom Mustill was vacationing in California with a friend when the two decided to take a kayak trip in Monterey Bay. The aim of the trip was to see whales up close, but Mustill and his friend got more than they had bargained for. As they were paddling about, a humpback shot up out of the water just feet from their boat. (Mustill later compared the experience to watching the space shuttle take off.) The whale, which weighed thirty tons, came down more or less on top of them. The two kayakers were sucked under, along with their boat. Mustill thought that he had been torn apart and attributed his lack of pain to being in shock. But he and his friend both resurfaced in one piece. They made it to shore, where the company that had rented them the kayak offered them free hot chocolate.

穆斯蒂尔继续他的假期，其中包括在大苏尔的露营。当他回到手机信号范围内时，他得知附近一艘船上的人将他与鲸鱼相遇的整个过程拍了下来，而且这段视频被发布到了YouTube上，已经变得非常热门。当穆斯蒂尔回到伦敦时，该视频已被观看了400万次。这个故事被全世界所关注。佛得角报纸《岛屿快讯》报道说：“40吨重的鲸鱼几乎压死了两个皮划艇运动员”。“我怎么还没死？”——《每日邮报》的标题写道。

Mustill continued with his vacation, which included a camping trip in Big Sur. When he got back in cell-phone range, he learned that someone on a nearby boat had captured his whole whale encounter on video, and that the video, posted to YouTube, had gone viral. By the time Mustill returned to London, it had been viewed four million times. The story was picked up around the world. “Baleia de 40 toneladas quase esmaga casal de canoístas” (“forty-ton whale nearly crushes couple of kayakers”), the Cape Verdean newspaper Expresso das Ilhas reported. “ ‘how am i not dead?’ ” the headline in the Daily Mail ran.

由于他的新名声，用他的话说，穆斯蒂尔成为“鲸鱼狂热者的闪电导体”。每个人，似乎都有一个关于鲸鱼的故事。许多故事涉及物种间的交流。一位英国海军成员告诉他，鲸鱼如何向位于潜艇内的他唱歌。一位图书出版商告诉他，一只怀孕的海豚——海豚和鼠海豚都属于被称为齿鲸的群体——告诉她（也就是出版商）也怀孕了，而她自己当时并不知道。一位科学家讲述了在墨西哥泻湖中与一条灰鲸对视的情景，这条灰鲸向她走来，让她揉搓它巨大的舌头。

As a result of his newfound fame, Mustill became, in his words, “a lightning conductor for whale fanatics.” Everyone, it seemed, had a story about whales. Many involved interspecies communx. A member of the British Navy told him about how whales had sung to him in his submarine. A book publisher told him about how a pregnant dolphin—both dolphins and porpoises belong to the group known as toothed whales—had indicated that she, the publisher, was also pregnant, something she herself had not known at the time. A scientist recounted locking eyes with a gray whale that approached her in a Mexican lagoon and let her rub its enormous tongue.

穆斯蒂尔自己也无法摆脱这种经历。一位鲸鱼研究者告诉他，他之所以能活下来，是因为座头鲸在注意到他和他的朋友后，故意转过身来，这样它在登陆时就不会杀死他们。穆斯蒂尔决定拍摄一部纪录片《鲸鱼侦探》，几年前在PBS播出。现在他又写了《鲸语：踏入动物交流的未来之旅》。

Mustill himself couldn’t shake the experience. A whale researcher told him that the only reason he had survived was that the humpback, upon noticing him and his friend, had purposefully turned its body so that it wouldn’t kill them when it landed. Mustill decided to make a documentary, “The Whale Detective,” which ran a couple of years ago on PBS. Now he has written “How to Speak Whale: A Voyage Into the Future of Animal Communication” (Grand Central).

像杨一样，穆斯蒂尔对动物的感知很感兴趣。但他想超越单纯的客观世界的转换，转向广义上可能被称为思想的交流。在书的前一部分，他去拜访了佩恩，他现在已经八十七岁了。他问道，为什么座头鲸会唱歌？它们的歌声又意味着什么？佩恩说他也说不准，“我非常想知道”。

Like Yong, Mustill is interested in animals’ perceptions. But he wants to push beyond mere Umwelt-switching to an exchange of what might, broadly speaking, be called ideas. Early in the book, he goes to visit Payne, who’s now eighty-seven. Why, he asks, do humpbacks sing? And what do their songs mean? Payne says he can’t say: “I would desperately love to know.”

穆斯蒂尔并没有被吓倒。他深入研究了关于动物交流的最新研究。许多物种已被证明具有高度复杂的信息传递系统——它们如此复杂，以至于可能可以被称为语言，尽管人们倾向于为自己保留“语言”这个词。例如，乌干达布东戈森林中的黑猩猩至少有五十八种手势，它们将这些手势按顺序组合起来，就像我们组合词语一样。美国西部的草原犬发出独特的叫声来表示不同的捕食者，而且它们似乎能够将描述纳入其中：例如，一只大狗会引起一种叫声；一只小狗则是另一种。栗冠弯嘴鹛是原产于澳大利亚的棕色和白色的可爱鸟类，当它们的叫声元素以不同的顺序播放时，它们会有不同的反应，就像我们在得到一个蛋糕盘而不是一个煎饼时的反应一样。

Mustill isn’t deterred. He delves into the latest research on animal communication. Many species have been shown to have highly complex systems of conveying information—so complex that they probably deserve to be called languages, though people tend to reserve the word “language” for themselves. Chimpanzees in the Budongo forest of Uganda, for instance, have a repertoire of at least fifty-eight gestures, which they combine in sequence much the way we combine words. Prairie dogs in the American West make distinctive cries to indicate different predators, and they seem to be able to incorporate descxtions into them: a big dog, for example, will elicit one sort of cry; a small dog, another sort. Chestnut-crowned babblers, sweet-looking brown-and-white birds native to Australia, respond differently when elements of their calls are played in different orders, much as we would respond differently when offered, say, a cake pan rather than a pancake.

由于录音技术和人工智能的进步，生物声学这一新兴领域的研究人员现在可以下载数千小时的动物声音，并将筛选它们的工作交给计算机。这开启了诱人的新可能性，包括将动物通信系统翻译成英语或阿拉伯语或科萨语。在穆斯蒂尔几乎被座头鲸杀死的六年后，一群来自哈佛大学、麻省理工学院和牛津大学等机构的科学家组成了鲸类翻译计划，试图破译鲸鱼的通信。（该团队正在与抹香鲸合作，抹香鲸不唱歌，而是发出被称为“尾声”的点击模式，它被比作摩斯密码。）

Owing to advances in recording technologies and artificial intelligence, researchers in the burgeoning field of bioacoustics can now download thousands of hours of animal sounds and leave the work of sifting through them to a computer. This has opened up tantalizing new possibilities, including that of translating animal-communication systems into English—or Arabic, or Xhosa. Six years after Mustill was nearly killed by the humpback, a group of scientists from, among other institutions, Harvard, M.I.T., and Oxford formed the Cetacean Translation Initiative, or ceti, to try to decipher whale communications. (The team is working with sperm whales, which, instead of singing, issue patterns of clicks, known as codas, that have been compared to Morse code.)

与《无垠的世界》一样，《鲸语》也被 “它是什么样的”的问题所困扰。穆斯蒂尔表示，解码鲸鱼的语言可以最终产生一个答案。问题是，或者说矛盾的是，要破译鲸鱼的歌声或点击声，我们需要获得它们所提及的经验。而这恰恰是我们所缺乏的。维特根斯坦甚至比纳格尔更直截了当。他在《哲学研究》中说：“如果狮子能说话，我们也无法理解它”。

No less than “An Immense World,” “How to Speak Whale” is dogged by the “what is it like” question. Mustill suggests that decoding whale-speak could finally produce an answer. The problem, or perhaps the paradox, is that to decipher whales’ songs or clicks we would need to have access to the experiences they’re referring to. And this is precisely what we lack. Wittgenstein was even blunter than Nagel. “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him,” he maintains in “Philosophical Investigations.”

穆斯蒂尔从未直接解决这个问题。“鲸语”是由他的信念支撑的，他认为鲸鱼有一些可以理解的东西要告诉我们，他希望有一天我们会很快弄清楚那是什么。穆斯蒂尔指出：“佩恩在1970年发行的专辑《座头鲸之歌》帮助结束了商业捕鲸”。想一想，如果我们能和鲸鱼聊一聊它们的爱情生活或它们的悲伤，或者它们对语言哲学的看法，那将是多么大的转变。穆斯蒂尔写道：“我们对其他动物了解得越多，发现它们多方面能力的证据，我们就越关心，这就改变了我们对待它们的方式”。
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Mustill never addresses this problem directly. “How to Speak Whale” is borne along by his faith that whales have something intelligible to tell us and his hope that one day soon we’ll figure out what that is. “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” the album that Payne released in 1970, helped bring about the end of commercial whaling, Mustill notes. Think how transformative it would be if we could chat with whales about their love lives or their sorrows or their thoughts on the philosophy of language. “The more we learn about other animals and discover evidence of their manifold capacities, the more we care, and this alters how we treat them,” Mustill writes.

这似乎是真的，或者至少看起来好像应该是真的。然而，非人类物种的前景每年都会变得更加严峻。就海洋哺乳动物物种而言，国际自然保护联盟现在将三分之一的物种列为濒危物种。一个欧洲研究小组最近的一项研究得出结论，即使是许多看起来还不错的物种，如灰鲸，也受到了气候变化的威胁。正如穆斯蒂尔本人所观察到的，“现在活着并探索自然，就是在燃烧的图书馆的火光下阅读”。

This seems to be true, or at least it seems as if it should be true. And yet every year the outlook for nonhuman species grows grimmer. In the case of marine-mammal species, the International unx for Conservation of Nature now classifies a third as endangered. A recent study by a team of European researchers concluded that even many of those species which seem to be doing all right, such as gray whales, are threatened by climate change. As Mustill himself observes, “To be alive and explore nature now is to read by the light of a library as it burns.”

那么，如果有机会的话，世界上剩下的鲸鱼会向我们传递什么信息呢？你如何发出“What the ***”的信号。