this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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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 days ago by gedaliyah@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world 0 points 13 hours ago

any system that communicates information is apparently a digital communications system, so long as you can imagine an arbitrary scheme to interpret at least one bit of information from the signal,

This has always been my point since the beginning! There exist very low bandwidth digital communication systems in real life, with less than one bit per second. The bandwidth available should be defined where something is digital or not.

regardless of whether that was the message intended to be communicated.

Seeing the bird in the spectrogram is quite intentional and sufficient to consider this a communications system.

It seems if instead of a bird picture, a random set of bits were encoded and then detected In the spectrogram, you’d consider this more of a digital system since instead of a human doing the check you use an algorithm?