YouTuber westh2o was diving underwater with friends in Moorea, French Polynesia when they began to hear the whale song of a humpback whale. Westh2o writes:

The recording does not do justice to the actual sound. Seriously some of those sounds vibrated my chest. I didn’t realize whales had such a wide frequency of sound. Some were mid to hi frequency and some were very low.

As they swam into the depths, straining their eyes to find the sound’s source in the cloudiness of the water, the vocalizations became louder, and then something huge began to emerge. Here’s a glimpse: 

Watch the video to get a reeeally good look. And then watch more whale encounters here, here, and here. 

via PetaPixel.

Northern Arizona University’s Con Slobodchikoff, Ph.D., and his student-teams have been studying the alarm calls of Gunnison’s prairie dogs for over 30 years. The result: the prairie dog language has been somewhat decoded. Yes, we know what they’re saying when they yip and squeak!

From The Atlantic: 

The animals have word-like phonemes, combining those into sentence-like calls. They have social chatter. They can distinguish between types of predators that are nearby — dogs, coyotes, humans — and seem to have developed warnings that specify the predators’ species and size and color. 

This video is a win-win because you get to watch prairie dogs (and their predators), all while learning about how we observe, analyze, and test to find out more about their sophisticated animal language. Be sure to read the interview with Slobodchikoff for more information…

Asami Ike on the passage of time, and on the devotion and love that dogs feel and bring into the lives of their humans.

Dogs are all end up to be a dusty dog. Dogs’ dust consists of pride of themselves and that of you. The film is of the memory, love and gratitude of the dusty dog, and many other dogs, tracing their senses and memories, dedicating to you who gave love to them.

Related animation: Asami Ike’s USAWaltz.

Bottle by Kirsten Lepore, a 2010 stop-motion animated story about a transoceanic, message-in-a-bottle conversation and the emotions that come with it.

We’ve featured Lepore’s work previously. You can also watch how she made Bottle in this behind the scenes vid.

Filmed against the sunset skies of Marseille, France, A Bird Ballet is a moment with a flock of (what we assume are) quickly-shifting starlings, caught by filmmakers Neels Castillon and Mathias Touzeris as they were waiting to film something else completely. Music: Hand-Made by Alt-J.

Previously: Murmuration. + the reasons and physics behind starling flocks, one with video.

via Vimeo.