Humans and Wild Birds Talk to Each Other to Find Honey in Mozambique
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-07-22/humans-and-wild-birds-talk-to-each-other-to-find-honey/7650038
In the article “Humans and Wild Birds Talk to Each Other to Find Honey in Mozambique”, author Karl Gruber discusses the recently discovered phenomenon of Mozambique honey hunters forging a relationship with wild birds towards a common goal, namely: to find the location of bees’ nests. The interesting thing is that not only the people look for the wild birds, also called “honeyguides”, but the birds also look for the hunters. The cooperation is a win-win for both sides, as the wild birds find the nests and the hunters in Mozambique crack open them. The interaction consists of hunters “(giving) at intervals a loud trill followed by a grunt — ‘brrrr-hm!’” This interesting interaction between a wild animal and our species is a very rare instance of humans “collaborating with a wild, free-living species, towards a common goal”. The article outlines several other “unique” communication techniques, such as the one between fishers and dolphins or killer whales.
This article connects to the idea of local bridges we studied in class. In the case of the article, the different animal kingdoms would represent different components, with the human “kingdom” representing the biggest one of all. The nodes would be different groups within each component (for example, in the birds kingdom, each node would represent a species of birds) and the edges would symbolize communication. I real life, there would be very little edges between animal kingdoms, however, as the article suggests, such connections do exist. Those connections would be the local bridges. They are not bridges, because by deleting them, we wouldn’t separate each component completely. As mentioned in the article, there are other connections (such as the one between fishers and dolphins). As a result, they would be local bridges, as they are one of several edges to connect the different components.
Overall, I found the article to be extremely interesting and believe that in the future, software might be developed to talk an animal’s language. As a result, the perception of our world would change a lot, especially when it comes to the networks of communication between species.