Arik Kershenbaum

College Lecturer and Fellow at Girton College
University of Cambridge

Dr Arik Kershenbaum is a zoologist, College Lecturer, and Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge, and an expert on animal vocal communication, which he has researched for the past 13 years, publishing more than 20 academic papers on the topic.

His first popular science book, The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy was a Times/Sunday Times Book of the Year, a BBC Science Focus magazine Best Space and Astronomy Books of the Year, received accolades from among others, Richard Dawkins and Lord Martin Rees (the Astronomer Royal), and was published in nine languages.

Dr Kershenbaum received his PhD at the University of Haifa in Israel, where he studied the complex communication of a small and poorly-understood mammal, the rock hyrax, demonstrating the sophisticated syntax of their bird-like songs. He has since concentrated on vocal communication in wolves and dolphins, looking at how their howls and whistles are used to convey specific information about the world around them. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis in the USA, Dr Kershenbaum became interested in the less familiar ways that animals encode information in their signals, and what alternatives might exist to the word-sentence approach with which we are familiar from human language. He was Herchel Smith Research Fellow in Zoology at the University of Cambridge, before taking up his position at Girton College.

Although some of Dr Kershenbaum’s research can be carried out with zoo and domestic animals, understanding natural behaviour means that much of his work involves field studies of animal communication in the wild. He has a long-running field site in the USA, where he deploys a network of automatic recording devices to monitor wolf howling, and triangulate the positions of the wolves, even when they cannot be observed. He also works with colleagues in Spain, Italy, and Romania, studying the interactions between wolves and livestock guardian dogs, testing whether the dog barking and howling acts as a deterrent to predators. The other main study species for this research is wild bottlenose dolphins, which Dr Kershenbaum studies in the Red Sea town of Eilat, Israel. Here, a group of animals frequent a shallow lagoon and interact with human swimmers. By observing the behaviour of the dolphins, and the sounds that they make, Dr Kershenbaum and his students investigate whether dolphins have special sounds that they use in human interactions.

Dr Kershenbaum has given interviews to numerous radio and TV stations, including the BBC World Service’s Science in Action, Public Radio International’s Living on Earth, and PBS’s flagship science TV documentary NOVA Wonders. He has given academic presentations across the world in Australia, France, Israel, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as the USA and UK.