Wolf communication

Subject in Life Sciences

Wolf communication has come up in 1 episode across 1 podcast in TMT, including TED Radio Hour. 1 person has made recorded remarks about it.

What people said

Reed illustrates how little wild mammal biomass remains compared with humans and livestock, arguing the real challenge is preserving wildness itself.
“If your body represented the total weight of all the world's land mammals today, your right forearm would be what's left of the wild ones”
TED Radio Hour: Can curiosity save the wild? (Oct 30, 2026) · Listen from 48:47
Reed speculates that wolves' bark-howl, combining an alarm with a location call, may be a basic form of combinatorial meaning or recursion.
“Is this a basic form of recursion or combinatorial meaning? And recursion is what most linguists would say today is what's unique about human languages”
TED Radio Hour: Can curiosity save the wild? (Oct 30, 2026) · Listen from 42:07
Reed cites researcher Kira Cassidy's finding that wolves estimate rival pack size from howls and decide whether to retreat or approach.
“wolves can count or estimate the number of wolves howling in a rival pack. And they make a decision”
TED Radio Hour: Can curiosity save the wild? (Oct 30, 2026) · Listen from 39:55
Reed says decoding wolf vocalizations will take so long that he expects to die before younger biologists fully do it.
“I'll be dead by the time the younger biologists really start decoding all of this information”
TED Radio Hour: Can curiosity save the wild? (Oct 30, 2026) · Listen from 36:28

Can curiosity save the wild?
TED Radio Hour · Oct 30, 2026 · 50 min
Manoush Zomorodi talks with conservationist Maya Higa about livestreamed wildlife sanctuaries and computational linguist Jeffrey Reed about using AI to study Yellowstone wolf howls.