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Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

149 comments fedilink hide all child comments

A music and science lover has revealed that some birds can store and retrieve digital data. Specifically, he converted a PNG sketch of a bird into an audio waveform, then tried to embed it in the song memory of a young starling, ready for later retrieval as an image. Benn Jordan made a video of this feat, sharing it on YouTube, and according to his calculations, the bird-based data transfer system could be capable of around 2 MB/s data speeds.

(page 2) 50 comments

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[–] biofaust@lemmy.world 7 points 2 weeks ago

I want this to be the next reveal in a movie or TV series, in the same fashion as the one of the Navajo "backing up" the Smoking Man's magnetic tape in The X-Files.

[–] crystalmerchant@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

B I R D S A R E N T R E A L

[–] Cort@lemmy.world 6 points 2 weeks ago

Yep, obviously a government funded drone if it only has 2Mb uplink

[–] orenj@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

How useful would this have been back at the dawn of computation, I wonder?

[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Pigeon guided missile but instead of pigeon it's a parrot and sings relevant source code in hex and an interpeter assembles it.

(I hate the last 4 words that sentence I made.)

[–] aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 weeks ago

They didn’t have ultrasonic microphones at the dawn of computation

[–] dsilverz@calckey.world 4 points 2 weeks ago

@gedaliyah@lemmy.world

In order to transmit/receive data during the night, a different carrier and modulation should be used: owls and a hoot-based Morse code (e.g. "ho-ho-ho-ho hooo-hooo-hooo hooo-hooo-hooo hooo" safely conveys "hoot" through the night skies).

[–] Goretantath@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

So a moving target of data you cant reliably recall and might get shot by someone looking for food. At least its neat though.

[–] brsrklf@jlai.lu 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Average weight for a starling is less than 100g. The whole thing with head and feathers and bones and whatever. You'd have to be very hungry to hunt that. And I suspect if you shoot at it you'd pulverize it completely.

Though cats are going to be a problem.

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 3 points 2 weeks ago

There will be a lot of cases where the data gets accidentally encapsulated (then fragmented due to incompatible protocols) in a cat.

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[–] altphoto@lemmy.today 3 points 2 weeks ago

I got the error correction baseball bat!

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