Skip to content

Interspecies signal model (literature-based; does not listen to or translate animals)

Encode a sentence for another species

Write something in English and pick a listener. The engine parses your words into a small set of shared concepts, keeps only what the listener’s lineage can hold, and re-encodes the rest as that species’ own signal: a volatile blend, a quorum molecule, an electrical spike train.

Every step is shown, including what did not survive, how strong the evidence is for each signal template, and where that evidence comes from.

Or try an example:

Only lineages with a signal template of their own are listed. Entries marked [lore] are invented for a game.

To

Western honey bee (Apis mellifera)

Waggle dance (von Frisch 1967) and sting alarm pheromone, isopentyl acetate (Boch, Shearer & Stone 1962).

↳Lineage from LUCA

  1. Last Universal Common Ancestor4200 Ma
  2. Archaea3800 Ma
  3. Asgard archaea2800 Ma
  4. Eukaryotes2000 Ma
  5. Amorphea1600 Ma
  6. Opisthokonts1300 Ma
  7. Animals750 Ma
  8. Bilaterians560 Ma
  9. Protostomes550 Ma
  10. Ecdysozoa540 Ma
  11. Arthropods530 Ma
  12. Insects480 Ma
  13. Bees, wasps, ants and sawflies280 Ma
  14. Apid bees90 Ma
  15. Honey bees30 Ma
  16. Western honey bee1 Ma

Ages are approximate lineage origins, in millions of years ago. A lineage can only hold concepts gained somewhere along this path.

aYour words as concepts

Your English, parsed into the engine’s interlingua: “Food, toward 0 degrees. Follow me toward 0 degrees.”

  • FOOD — there is foodtemplate confidence (hand-set) 90%direction_deg=0
  • RECRUIT — follow me / join this tasktemplate confidence (hand-set) 90%direction_deg=0

bThe native signal

What Western honey bee would receive: “Food, toward 0 degrees. Follow me toward 0 degrees.”

Groundedapis_mellifera.waggle_dance

Tactile — touch, antennation, dances in the dark

type
waggle_dance
waggle_angle_degnumber, angle of the waggle run clockwise from vertical on the comb
180
sun_azimuth_degnumber, sun azimuth at the time of the dance (default 180, local noon, northern hemisphere)
180
circuitsnumber, dance circuits performed; more for a richer source
10

Signal format { type: 'waggle_dance', waggle_angle_deg, waggle_duration_s?, sun_azimuth_deg?, circuits?, floral_scent? } or { type: 'round_dance', circuits?, floral_scent? } — a forager's dance on the vertical comb, read by nestmates in the dark through touch and vibration. The angle of the waggle run from straight up is the bearing of the food relative to the sun's azimuth; the duration of the waggle phase scales with distance (about 1 s per km here; the true slope varies by colony and landscape). Food closer than ~100 m gets a round dance with no direction. Recruits also learn the flower's scent from the dancer's body.

Read back into English “Food, toward 0 degrees. Follow me toward 0 degrees.”

cWhat the model drops

78%Model confidence: the signal templates’ hand-set confidences averaged over the concepts you sent, reduced by fixed factors for each fallback step, for evolutionary distance from humans and for a change of sensory channel. It is not a measured accuracy; nothing is translated.

No concept was dropped or degraded — but confidence still decays with evolutionary distance and any change of channel.

dEvidence

GroundedThe signal-to-meaning mapping is established in peer-reviewed work.

Grounded
The signal-to-meaning mapping is established in peer-reviewed work.
Partial
A real signal whose meaning is only partly known or still contested.
Speculative
A plausible extrapolation from related species or weak evidence.
Lore
Invented for a game (extinct species, LUCA-level chemistry). Not a scientific claim.

eSources

  1. von Frisch K. (1967) The Dance Language and Orientation of Bees. Harvard University Press (Belknap), Cambridge, MA.

EarthConvergence interspecies engineRuns entirely in your browser.