Scientists have developed an AI model that can listen to the chewing sounds of predators and identify what they are eating.The tool was trained with audio of whitespotted eagle rays crushing open shells of the mollusks they are preying on.It’s crucial to understand predator-prey interactions to figure out the resources the predator depends on and the pressure it puts on prey.
What does an eagle ray’s menu look like?
An artificial intelligence model can now answer that question by listening to sounds of the animal chewing on food.
Scientists developed the machine learning algorithm to detect the sound of shells being crushed by predators when they feed on mollusks. According to a study published in the journal Ecological Informatics, the model can also identify the prey based on the sounds.
“A lot of animals out there, particularly marine animals, have the unique ability to crush shells open,” Matt Ajemian, assistant research professor at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute at Florida Atlantic University in the U.S. who was part of the research, told Mongabay in a video interview. “But we don’t know how much they eat and what they feed on. So we wanted to see if we could remotely detect an animal feeding on a clam versus a gastropod.”
