"Neat! Years ago I asked Cricket if he could understand cats at all and he said 'no, I only speak English'..."

“I think they’ve never confirmed language in a non-primate but I could so easily be wrong there.”

"Not even like dolphins?"

“Oh! Uh, dolphins probably have language but I don’t know as much about that—but orcas have ethnicity!”

"Oh no, poor orcas!"

“I don’t recall anything about ethnic violence…”

"Well, then how do you tell?"

“Phenotype differences.”

"That's not an ethnicity, just a morph."

“It’s an ethnicity when the phenotype differences are geographically distributed.”

"Are morphs not?"

“…We have wandered outside the details I remember from science YouTube, sorry.”

"I think it's not an ethnicity if it doesn't have a sociocultural component, anyway, if everyone were magically unable to connect what I look like to where my ancestors were from I think that would meaningfully prevent me from having an ethnicity."

“Oh, I mean, I do think they have cultural differences? Like the salmon hat thing.”

"The what!"

“I don’t remember which group of orcas it was, but at one point a number of orcas went through a fad of wearing dead fish on their heads! Like a hat!”

"How did they even stay on??"

“I don’t know!”

"That's so weird! I'm not sure I'd choose on my own to call the salmon-hat subculture an ethnic group but I guess it reduces my objection to someone else having done it?"

“Oh, I mean, they have other cultural stuff—hunting techniques, and so on—the hat thing is just a particularly standout example. Also, funny.”

"It is definitely funny. You can learn what echolocation feels like, I hear sometimes blind humans learn to do it and you might have a leg up in figuring it out without being blind..."

“I bet cetacean echolocation and bat echolocation feel different! They make such different noises!”

"Or maybe they're the same! Who knows? Soon, you."

“Ee!” She half-claps, rapidly tapping her fingers but not palms together. “It’s going to be so cool. Oh, man, I am gonna be able to feel what it’s like to purr, I’ve always wondered that.”

"I bet Cricket'll volunteer for that one, he can purr and talk at the same time, it's incredibly useful when I'm backlashed."