Owls(猫头鹰) are some of the world’s greatest hunters. From head to feet, owls’ bodies are built to hunt. Scientists are studying all the things that make owls such great hunters.

Most owls hunt at night. The birds have excellent hearing, which helps them find their next meal in the dark.

Owls have one ear that is larger and set higher than the other. When an owl hears a sound, it listens closely. Is the sound louder in its right ear or left ear? Does the upper or lower ear detect the sound first? The information helps the owl find the location of its prey(猎物) without even seeing it.

Owls don’t depend just on their hearing to hunt. After a sound draws an owl’s attention, it zeroes in with sight.

Many birds have eyes on either side of their heads. But an owl’s eyes face forward, like a person’s. Images from each eye combine to form a 3-D picture, similar to how we see. That helps owls better judge a prey’s size, distance, and speed.

An owl’s eyes are so large that they can gather lets of light. That helps the owl see better when hunting at night. An owl’s eyes are also fixed in their sockets(眼窝). It can’t roll them like we can. Instead, an owl keeps prey in its sight by turning its head.

Owls can move their heads nearly upside down and turn them 270 degrees around. Their necks have 14 vertebrae(椎骨). That’s twice as many neck bones as a person has.

Detecting prey is only the first step for owls. Next they must catch their meals. An owl can fly inches over your head and you can’t hear anything. The secret to owls’ silent flight is their feathers. Fine “hairs” cover the surface of an owl’s wing feathers. And the feathers’ edges have soft barbs(羽支). Together, they make the sound of air rushing over the owl’s wings quieter and less clear.

Bees are essential for the pollination (授粉) of flowers, fruits and vegetables. Sadly, over the past 15 years, the global population of the hardworking insects has been dropping worldwide at alarming rates due to loss of food and habitat. Now, Dutch cities are coming up with creative ideas to help stem the population decrease of these important insects.

In Amsterdam, bees can live for free in specially built “hotels”-tall wooden structures-across the city. They provide perfect homes for members of the over 200 known species of solitary (独居的) bees. As the name indicates, the insects spend their lives alone. Though unable to produce honey, solitary bees are excellent pollinators and perform an essential role in many ecosystems.

Additionally, city officials are also educating people on the use of harmful chemicals and are providing prize money to encourage developers to build green roofs and populate them with local plants. In 2015, they set a goal to change some plants in public green spaces to native plants. Geert, one of the eight ecologists working for the city, says, “Our idea is when we design a park, we use native species but also the species that give a lot of flowering and fruit for bees.” Many people, with help from the government, are replacing the sidewalks outside their homes with small gardens featuring flowers.

In Utrecht, bus stop roofs are gradually being turned into beautiful, living gardens designed to draw varieties of bee species’ attention. The green roofs, which naturally collect both rainwater and dust, are also beneficial for the environment.

These cities’ collective efforts seem to be working. A recent study found that the variety of bee species there has increased by an astonishing 45 percent since 2000.

Begus is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He got the chance, last summer, to observe sperm whales in their wild Caribbean habitat. With him were marine (海洋的) biologists and roboticists. There were also cryptographers and experts in other fields. All have been working together to listen to sperm whales and figure out what they might be saying. They call this Project CETI. Project CETI’s team is not the only group turning to AI for help decoding animal talk. Researchers have trained AI models to sort through the sounds of prairie dogs, dolphins, naked mole rats and many other creatures.

Long before AI came into the picture, scientists and others have worked toward understanding animal communication. Some learned that vervet monkeys have different calls when warning of leopards, eagles or pythons. Others discovered that elephants communicate in rumbles too low for human ears to hear. Bats chatter in squeaks too high for our hearing. Still other groups have explored how bees communicate through dance.

“It took us a long time to measure all these things,” says researcher Karen Bakker. AI, she notes, has the potential to greatly speed up this type of research. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to use AI to build a futuristic chat box that translates animal sounds into human language, or vice versa (反之亦然).

“Al could eventually get us to the point where we understand animals,” says Bakker. What’s interesting to her is what we can learn from how bats and other creatures talk among each other. We should listen to animals for better protection, she argues. For example, a system set up to record whales or elephants can also track their locations. This can help us avoid whales with our boats or prevent elephants from illegal hunters.