AI is accelerating animal communication research, but welfare protections and regulations are not keeping pace. @MORGANMEAKER's recent article in @Bloomberg highlights a growing ethical gap in the race to decode animal communication. Researchers, including Dr. Vittorio Baglione and Daniela Canestrari from @unileon, are using machine learning from the @earthspecies to analyze more than 150,000 carrion crow recordings. Similar efforts include @ProjectCETI's work on sperm whales and the Coller Doolittle Challenge, which aims to advance two-way communication with animals. The scientific ambition behind these projects is remarkable. The ethical oversight is less so. Most safeguards governing these projects were designed for an earlier era of experiments on wild animals. Ethics review boards assess physical risks such as tagging and handling, but offer little protection for AI-driven acoustic monitoring, synthetic signal generation, and large-scale playback experiments. Prof. César Rodríguez-Garavito of @nyulaw's More-Than-Human Life Program and Prof. @KristinAndrewz of the @GradCenterNews, have raised concerns about playback experiments in which recorded calls are broadcast back to animals. These interventions can alter behavior, create stress, disrupt social relationships, and influence animals in ways researchers do not fully understand. In a 2025 report by César Rodríguez-Garavito, David Gruber, @_anemeth, and @begusgasper on nonhuman animal communication technologies (NACTs), the authors warn that the same tools developed for conservation could also be used for surveillance, capture, military applications, illegal poaching, or other ways that exploit animals. ecologylawquarterly.org/prin… The scientific community is making significant progress toward understanding animal communication. The equally important question is whether welfare standards, ethics review processes, and regulatory frameworks will evolve quickly enough to govern how that knowledge is applied. 📍Read the article: bloomberg.com/news/articles/… #AnimalWelfare #ResearchEthics #Bioethics #SciencePolicy #AnimalCommunication #NACTs