Dr Arik Kershenbaum

• Animal vocal communication and evolution of language
• Passive acoustic monitoring of large carnivores
• Conservation technology and bioacoustics
• Xenolinguistics and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
• Evolutionary ecology and cooperation
• Behavioural ecology
• Mathematical ecology

For more information on our bioacoustic conservation technology, visit my research group website: https://www.bioacousticsresearchgroup.org/ 

 

Main study species: Wolves & other canids Human-tiger conflict Gibbons Dolphins & cetaceans

I study the vocal behaviour of wolves the United States, as well as Europe and the Middle East. I am particularly interested in the use of different vocalisations in different behavioural contexts, like territorial interactions, and cohesion calls between distant individuals. This information can help us design conservation and management strategies that prevent conflict between wildlife and humans.

Tiger populations in Nepal have been growing as part of a conservation success story. But more tigers means more conflict with humans. We have deployed an acoustic monitoring system that can warn villagers of tiger danger by listening for and automatically detecting the alarm calls of spotted deer. We use the acoustics technology that we have developed to monitor and track the habitat use of the critically endangered Cao Vit gibbon in Vietnam, of which only 70 animals remain in the world. By triangulating their calls, we can assess movement and inter-group interaction, which are critical conservation goals for this unique primate. Understanding dolphin communication is particularly difficult because they are hard to follow in the wild, and their behaviour in captivity is highly restricted. In Eilat, Israel, I study a pod of free-ranging dolphins that are habituated to human presence, and so give us the opportunity to examine the link between vocal and social behaviour. The way that dolphins encode information into sound is more complex and more unusual than we previously thought.  Other study species Hyraxes Birds Aliens...  

Dr Victoria Pham, PhD, University of Cambridge (2024)

 

Key publications

Kershenbaum, A., Blumstein, D. T., Roch, M. A., Akçay, Ç., Backus, G., Bee, M. A., ... & Zamora‐Gutierrez, V. (2016). Acoustic sequences in non‐human animals: a tutorial review and prospectus. Biological Reviews, 91(1), 13-52.

Kershenbaum, A., Bowles, A. E., Freeberg, T. M., Jin, D. Z., Lameira, A. R., & Bohn, K. (2014). Animal vocal sequences: not the Markov chains we thought they were. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 281(1792), 20141370.

Kershenbaum, A., Sayigh, L. S., & Janik, V. M. (2013). The encoding of individual identity in dolphin signature whistles: How much information is needed?. PloS one, 8(10), e77671.

Kershenbaum, A., Ilany, A., Blaustein, L., & Geffen, E. (2012). Syntactic structure and geographical dialects in the songs of male rock hyraxes. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 279(1740), 2974-2981.

Kershenbaum, A., Root-Gutteridge, H., Habib, B., Koler-Matznick, J., Mitchell, B., Palacios, V., & Waller, S. (2016). Disentangling canid howls across multiple species and subspecies: structure in a complex communication channel. Behavioural Processes, 124, 149-157.

Kershenbaum, A. (2014). Entropy rate as a measure of animal vocal complexity. Bioacoustics, 23(3), 195-208. 

Kershenbaum, A., Demartsev, V., Gammon, D. E., Geffen, E., Gustison, M. L., Ilany, A., & Lameira, A. R. (2021). Shannon entropy as a robust estimator of Zipf's Law in animal vocal communication repertoires. Methods in Ecology and Evolution, 12(3), 553-564.

Kershenbaum, A., Owens, J. L., & Waller, S. (2019). Tracking cryptic animals using acoustic multilateration: A system for long-range wolf detection. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145(3), 1619-1628.

Full list of publications: Arik Kershenbaum