• Bob Robertson IX @discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 months ago

      Only to find out that whales are some of the foulest mouthed, rudest, and just plain mean creatures on the planet. Sure, they are mostly gentle physically, but they will absolutely destroy you verbally.

      But all joking aside… what would you ask a whale?

    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      You might be interested in some of Dr Irene Pepperberg’s work. She worked a lot with parrots specifically, and pretty well showed that they’re capable of an actual working vocabulary, not just mimicry.

      Edit - Damn there were like 5 mis-auto-corrected words in like 2 sentences. Apologies to anyone who tried to read that and thought they were having a stroke.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      We kind of can…

      Birds are manipulative dicks and constantly lie about shit, but you can verbally communicate with more than a few species in your native human language.

      They won’t have a perfect grasp of what’s going on, but they understand a lot.

      • Icalasari@fedia.io
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        8 months ago

        Corvids are the best ones to do this with, especially crows and ravens. Crows and ravens are capable of mimicry, are fairly common, and have their own language complex enough to pass down accurate information through generations

      • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        No animal understands the concept of a question not even great ape relatives to us