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Starling Stores Digital Image in First Animal Data Storage Demonstration

By encoding a 176 KB image as sound that the bird learned to mimic, researcher Benn Jordan demonstrated data retrieval from a rescued European starling

Starlings are viewed at the surroundings of Lake Uluabat, one of the richest lakes in Turkiye in terms of bird population, on April 10, 2024. Lake Uluabat is an important breeding ground for many bird species. Around the lake, migratory birds of different species that come to our country with spring migration and many resident bird species can be observed.
An image about YouTuber saves PNG file to a live bird in what may be a world first
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Overview

  • Jordan used a spectral synthesizer to convert a hand-drawn image into an ultrasonic audio waveform and played it to a rescue starling named The Mouth
  • The starling imitated the sequence with fidelity sufficient to reconstruct the original 176 KB file from its vocalization
  • European starlings’ dual-channel syrinx and vocal memory enable reproduction of complex spectrogram-encoded data
  • Jordan calculates that, under ideal 10:1 compression, the bird-based method could approach 2 MB/s despite biological constraints
  • Ongoing research will evaluate the approach’s scalability, reliability and ethical implications for future biological data storage