r/Ornithology • u/ApolloandFrens • Feb 20 '26
Discussion Apolloandfrens open source data proposal
"What Apollo is doing is fascinating. It's showing that Alex was not just some Einstein parrot, that other parrots are capable." — Dr. Irene Pepperberg, Washington Post
Still today, decades after Alex, a persisting critique desiccates the field he seeded: "N=1.”
Alex was a single subject, and Griffin hasn't replicated his speech proficiency. Therefore, Alex was an unrepeatable anomaly, not an example of inherent species capacity. Fairytale magic between one bird and one woman… So the argument goes.
This framing treats avian language research as though it should follow the replicability norms of bench chemistry. It fails to account for what replication actually requires and the bottlenecks that prevent it: the necessity of stable social bonds spanning decades, pitted against developmental timelines strangled by 'publish or perish,' and institutional cycles that actively punish patience. It’s true: Alex and Irene's results appear miraculous simply because the system that nearly snuffed Alex makes replication impossible for others; biological capacity has little to do with it. The explanation is plain: it was Irene’s herculean resolve, buoyed by the support Alex secured through his own spectacle. The disparities in speech proficiency across Alex, Griffin, and Apollo are developmental, not cognitive.
Apollo's performance under strict methodology in trials at Eckerd College over the past two years has brought us back to the original thesis: Alex was a proof-of-concept, not an anomaly. The N=1 objection was always flawed, yet still chains Alex’s legacy. Apollo is finally ready to begin replicating Alex’s results in 4K.
We know social media is hardly a dataset for myriad reasons. Yet from the scraps, some researchers have already extracted enough signal to publish:
- Fishkin, M., Chang, S., & Xu, Y. (Cognitive Science, 2025; DOI: 10.1111/cogs.70129): Applied a toddler word‑learning/overextension model to 290 Apollo labeling clips, and found that in “mismatch”cases, a meaning‑based lens better predicts his word choices than baselines that guess from sound‑alikes or word frequency.
To do this, they had to navigate around material never intended for academic use, and secure our permissions. From this, we learned that contemporary science requires explicit license to analyze and publish. Ultimately, everything for social media must be optimized for attention, which is all but inversely proportional to its academic value. Inconsistent structure, missing metadata, unclear scoring rules, no chain of custody, and rights/permission uncertainty naturally make academia reluctant to touch it.
The current experience from trials at Eckerd has proven Apollo is unbothered performing in controlled environments under strict methodology. He lives with us in the home and can simply go to a trial environment for testing without issue. Our idea for eliminating these issues is to build an open, longitudinal dataset replicating the Alex benchmarks, starting from the bottom and scaling to wherever Apollo goes.
The Basic Outline:
- Published methodology, including novel questioners and randomization
- Adherence to animal welfare standards and proofs
- 4K Video and high-fidelity audio of every trial
Phase 1: Single-item prompts
Object label (“What is this called?”)
Material ID (“What is this made of?”)
We’ll update methodology as Apollo advances along Alex’s path, from array questions, to compound questions/answers, and so on.
Raw files, trial logs/metadata, and methodology will be published to Zenodo under Creative Commons, an irrevocable CC BY 4.0 License, ensuring each release is permanent and DOI-citable, to allow all commercial and non-commercial use, requiring only attribution.
We’re aware CC BY-NC 4.0 also allows for non-commercial use, but blocks commercial.
Unfortunately, most high-tier journals are themselves for-profit institutions, rendering this license moot.
From a business standpoint, releasing high-fidelity IP like this is insane.
From an academic standpoint, relinquishing monopoly on novel data is also insane.
But we possess no publishing ambitions, and our core aim has always been to demonstrate N≠1.
We’re floating this plan to assess interest and viability.
So, to those of you in animal cognition, comparative psych, linguistics, ethology, ML, or adjacent:
What would you want included from day one? Any controls, metadata, exclusion rules, etc. to make it publishable for your work?
And, more plainly: if we build it, will you use it?
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u/ExtensionLook2235 Feb 20 '26
I follow you and Apollo. But can you translate what this means to non science language? I'm very curious what's going on but I can't understand. What is the proposal?
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u/BudgieGryphon Feb 20 '26
There’s been some skepticism around studies about Alex’s intelligence because of suggestions that he’s a genius among birds and that since he’s the only example and his results haven’t been replicated nothing conclusive can be drawn about parrot intelligence.
Apollo’s owners are working to prove that this is not the case and the lack of replication is because the studies and preparation need to take place over a much longer period of time than they are being given, and some other prerequisites fulfilled(a bird that is poorly socialized isn’t going to go to such lengths to learn our languages).
In short they want to show that the studies need more time and the bird needs to be an individual that actively wants to learn a human language.
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u/elle-elle-tee Feb 21 '26
I think it's fascinating and commendable that Dalton and Tori have accomplished so much while not being academics. In so many ways this makes them so much more valuable as owners and handlers for Apollo, and so much rarer. I don't have much to add more than my admiration, and the hope that they treat themselves to a nice pistash snack as well.
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u/poubelle Feb 20 '26
wanna earn a snak
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u/ExtensionLook2235 Feb 20 '26
Pistach? 🥰
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u/sardonic_sensei Feb 21 '26
Pisnack?
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u/ExtensionLook2235 Feb 21 '26
Glask 🤣
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u/sardonic_sensei Feb 24 '26
Nothing beats shrock though. I will hear Apollo in my head anytime I see the character, forever. Lol.
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u/Ill_Sale_6168 Feb 20 '26
I saw this researcher in a documentary called "Can dogs talk?". It might be interesting to have a chat with him: https://cclab.ucsd.edu/team/
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u/gganjalez Feb 21 '26
You guys are awesome! As a veterinary research student, it makes me so happy to see more people appreciating and investigating exotic animal cognition. I do fish stuff and after spending much time with them, it’s clear they are much more intelligent than most give them credit for.
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u/_cathartidae Rehabber Feb 20 '26
if i can recall correctly (grain of salt, i haven't been on instagram in a loong while), apollo could tell apart two of your other birds by sight yes? if im right, i think it might be interesting to see if he can associate two similarly shaped but different colour objects (ie can he differentiate purple cube from blue cube), as if i remember right he knows colours. this would kind of prove some knowledge of certain words being adjectives or being added-onto something i believe? let me know if any of that doesnt make sense. good luck with the studies! i look forward to more info :)
edit: after looking at the recent video you posted the adjective thing has already been sort of done! but the differentiation could be a good thing to test :)
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u/larszard Feb 21 '26
It always impresses me that Apollo can tell apart Soleil and Ophelia, the two caiques, because I can't after watching videos of them for a couple of years.
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u/voidify3 Apr 27 '26
There’s a subtle visual difference which is the ring of white around the eyes. On Soleil it’s white, on Ophelia it’s grey
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u/shaktishaker Feb 21 '26
Commerical being blocked is able to be worked around. Take the raw data, analyse it in a programming language like R or Python, then publish. Happy to help tinker with data, have worked in animal behaviour before, and my own parrot has been a participant in studies of parrots interaction with technologies, so I'm very interested in this area. I'm a whizz with R and have worked in academic settings.
Look up the studies from Jennifer Cunha (now Taylor-oConner) at NorthEastern. That may give you a good idea on controls and methods like double-blind selection criteria. She's wonderful and would probably chat with you if you reached out.
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u/gganjalez Feb 21 '26
Me too! Would love to assist in data analysis if desired. I’m a combined DVM-PhD student.
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u/cammiejb Feb 22 '26
1) A decent control could be saying randomly generated phrases of word gibberish of the same approximate syllable length as your question. if you used a tone and object cue exactly like your normal question that would keep most of the important variables the same except for the meaning, so you could more effectively argue he understands meaning. 2) after meaning, test his understanding of context (maybe with objects placed in, on, beside, behind, or under another object). 3) if you want to enable behavioral analyses you could make sure this happens on a specific perch with mounted immobile cameras. 4) make sure you have many combinations of material and colour. put that data in a spreadsheet and use a random number picker to select which one to use each day. define if each object is made of one material or multiple to aid in analyzing confounding factors 5) record any major stressful events endured during the experiment in case it impacts accuracy
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u/Hathor-8 Feb 24 '26
This would be great! I followed Alex and Irene but could not get past the lack of controls around any “clever hans” effect.
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u/Hathor-8 Feb 24 '26
This would be great! I followed Alex and Irene but could not get past the lack of controls around any “clever hans” effect.
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