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An Introduction to Animal Communication

The ability to communicate effectively with other individuals plays a critical role in the lives of all animals. Whether we are examining how moths attract a mate, ground squirrels convey information about nearby predators, or chimpanzees maintain positions in a dominance hierarchy, communication systems are involved. Here, I provide a primer about the types of communication signals used by animals and the variety of functions they serve. Animal communication is classically defined as occurring when “...the action of or cue given by one organism [the sender] is perceived by and thus alters the probability pattern of behavior in another organism [the receiver] in a fashion adaptive to either one both of the participants” (Wilson 1975). While both a sender and receiver must be involved for communication to occur (Figure 1), in some cases only one player benefits from the interaction. For example, female Photuris fireflies manipulate smaller, male Photinus fireflies by mimicking the flash signals produced by Photinus females. When males investigate the signal, they are voraciously consumed by the larger firefly (Lloyd 1975; Figure 2). This is clearly a case where the sender benefits and the receiver does not. Alternatively, in the case of fringe-lipped bats, Trachops cirrhosus , and tungara frogs, Physalaemus pustulosus , the receiver is the only player that benefits from the interaction. Male tungara frogs produce advertisement calls to attract females to their location; while the signal is designed to be received by females, eavesdropping fringe-lipped bats also detect the calls, and use that information to locate and capture frogs (Ryan et al . 1982). Despite these examples, there are many cases in which both the sender and receiver benefit from exchanging information. Greater sage grouse nicely illustrate such “true communication”; during the mating season, males produce strutting displays that are energetically expensive, and females use this honest information about male quality to choose which individuals to mate with (Vehrencamp et al . 1989).

Figure 1 A model of animal communication.

Figure 2: Photinus fireflies. Courtesy of Tom Eisner.

Signal Modalities

Animals use a variety of sensory channels, or signal modalities, for communication. Visual signals are very effective for animals that are active during the day. Some visual signals are permanent advertisements; for example, the bright red epaulets of male red-winged blackbirds, Agelaius phoeniceus, which are always displayed, are important for territory defense. When researchers experimentally blackened epaulets, males were subject to much higher rates of intrusion by other males (Smith 1972). Alternatively, some visual signals are actively produced by an individual only under appropriate conditions. Male green anoles, Anolis carolinensis, bob their head and extend a brightly colored throat fan (dewlap) when signaling territory ownership. Acoustic communication is also exceedingly abundant in nature, likely because sound can be adapted to a wide variety of environmental conditions and behavioral situations. Sounds can vary substantially in amplitude, duration, and frequency structure, all of which impact how far the sound will travel in the environment and how easily the receiver can localize the position of the sender. For example, many passerine birds emit pure-tone alarm calls that make localization difficult, while the same species produce more complex, broadband mate attraction songs that allow conspecifics to easily find the sender (Marler 1955). A particularly specialized form of acoustic communication is seen in microchiropteran bats and cetaceans that use high-frequency sounds to detect and localize prey. After sound emission, the returning echo is detected and processed, ultimately allowing the animal to build a picture of their surrounding environment and make very accurate assessments of prey location. Compared to visual and acoustic modalities, chemical signals travel much more slowly through the environment since they must diffuse from the point source of production. Yet, these signals can be transmitted over long distances and fade slowly once produced. In many moth species, females produce chemical cues and males follow the trail to the female’s location. Researchers attempted to tease apart the role of visual and chemical signaling in silkmoths, Bombyx mori , by giving males the choice between a female in a transparent airtight box and a piece of filter paper soaked in chemicals produced by a sexually receptive female. Invariably, males were drawn to the source of the chemical signal and did not respond to the sight of the isolated female (Schneider 1974; Figure 3). Chemical communication also plays a critical role in the lives of other animals, some of which have a specialized vomeronasal organ that is used exclusively to detect chemical cues. For example, male Asian elephants, Elaphus maximus , use the vomeronasal organ to process chemical cues in female’s urine and detect if she is sexually receptive (Rasmussen et al . 1982).

Figure 3 Male silkmoths are more strongly attracted to the pheromones produced by females (chemical signal) than the sight of a female in an airtight box (visual signal). Tactile signals, in which physical contact occurs between the sender and the receiver, can only be transmitted over very short distances. Tactile communication is often very important in building and maintaining relationship among social animals. For example, chimpanzees that regularly groom other individuals are rewarded with greater levels of cooperation and food sharing (de Waal 1989). For aquatic animals living in murky waters, electrical signaling is an ideal mode of communication. Several species of mormyrid fish produce species-specific electrical pulses, which are primarily used for locating prey via electrolocation, but also allow individuals searching for mates to distinguish conspecifics from heterospecifics. Foraging sharks have the ability to detect electrical signals using specialized electroreceptor cells in the head region, which are used for eavesdropping on the weak bioelectric fields of prey (von der Emde 1998).

Signal Functions

Some of the most extravagant communication signals play important roles in sexual advertisement and mate attraction. Successful reproduction requires identifying a mate of the appropriate species and sex, as well as assessing indicators of mate quality. Male satin bowerbirds, Ptilonorhynchus violaceus , use visual signals to attract females by building elaborate bowers decorated with brightly colored objects. When a female approaches the bower, the male produces an elaborate dance, which may or may not end with the female allowing the male to copulate with her (Borgia 1985). Males that do not produce such visual signals have little chance of securing a mate. While females are generally the choosy sex due to greater reproductive investment, there are species in which sexual roles are reversed and females produce signals to attract males. For example, in the deep-snouted pipefish, Syngnathus typhle , females that produce a temporary striped pattern during the mating period are more attractive to males than unornamented females (Berglund et al . 1997). Communication signals also play an important role in conflict resolution, including territory defense. When males are competing for access to females, the costs of engaging in physical combat can be very high; hence natural selection has favored the evolution of communication systems that allow males to honestly assess the fighting ability of their opponents without engaging in combat. Red deer, Cervus elaphus , exhibit such a complex signaling system. During the mating season, males strongly defend a group of females, yet fighting among males is relatively uncommon. Instead, males exchange signals indicative of fighting ability, including roaring and parallel walks. An altercation between two males most often escalates to a physical fight when individuals are closely matched in size, and the exchange of visual and acoustic signals is insufficient for determining which animal is most likely to win a fight (Clutton-Brock et al . 1979). Communication signals are often critical for allowing animals to relocate and accurately identify their own young. In species that produce altricial young, adults regularly leave their offspring at refugia, such as a nest, to forage and gather resources. Upon returning, adults must identify their own offspring, which can be especially difficult in highly colonial species. Brazilian free-tailed bats, Tadarida brasiliensis , form cave colonies containing millions of bats; when females leave the cave each night to forage, they place their pup in a crèche that contains thousands of other young. When females return to the roost, they face the challenge of locating their own pups among thousands of others. Researchers originally thought that such a discriminatory task was impossible, and that females simply fed any pups that approached them, yet further work revealed that females find and nurse their own pup 83% of the time (McCracken 1984, Balcombe 1990). Females are able to make such fantastic discriminations using a combination of spatial memory, acoustic signaling, and chemical signaling. Specifically, pups produce individually-distinct “isolation calls”, which the mother can recognize and detect from a moderate distance. Upon closer inspection of a pup, females use scent to further confirm the pup’s identity. Many animals rely heavily on communication systems to convey information about the environment to conspecifics, especially close relatives. A fantastic illustration comes from vervet monkeys, Chlorocebus pygerythrus , in which adults give alarm calls to warn colony members about the presence of a specific type of predator. This is especially valuable as it conveys the information needed to take appropriate actions given the characteristics of the predator (Figure 4). For example, emitting a “cough” call indicates the presence of an aerial predator, such as an eagle; colony members respond by seeking cover amongst vegetation on the ground (Seyfarth & Cheney 1980). Such an evasive reaction would not be appropriate if a terrestrial predator, such as a leopard, were approaching.

Figure 4 Vervet monkeys. Many animals have sophisticated communication signals for facilitating integration of individuals into a group and maintaining group cohesion. In group-living species that form dominance hierarchies, communication is critical for maintaining ameliorative relationships between dominants and subordinates. In chimpanzees, lower-ranking individuals produce submissive displays toward higher-ranking individuals, such as crouching and emitting “pant-grunt” vocalizations. In turn, dominants produce reconciliatory signals that are indicative of low aggression. Communication systems also are important for coordinating group movements. Contact calls, which inform individuals about the location of groupmates that are not in visual range, are used by a wide variety of birds and mammals. Overall, studying communication not only gives us insight into the inner worlds of animals, but also allows us to better answer important evolutionary questions. As an example, when two isolated populations exhibit divergence over time in the structure of signals use to attract mates, reproductive isolation can occur. This means that even if the populations converge again in the future, the distinct differences in critical communication signals may cause individuals to only select mates from their own population. For example, three species of lacewings that are closely related and look identical are actually reproductively isolated due to differences in the low-frequency songs produced by males; females respond much more readily to songs from their own species compared to songs from other species (Martinez, Wells & Henry 1992). A thorough understanding of animal communication systems can also be critical for making effective decisions about conservation of threatened and endangered species. As an example, recent research has focused on understanding how human-generated noise (from cars, trains, etc) can impact communication in a variety of animals (Rabin et al . 2003). As the field of animal communication continues to expand, we will learn more about information exchange in a wide variety of species and better understand the fantastic variety of signals we see animals produce in nature.

Vomeronasal organ – auxiliary olfactory organ that detects chemosensory cues

Altricial – the state of being born in an immature state and relying exclusively on parental care for survival during early development

Refugia – areas that provide concealment from predators and/or protection from harsh environmental conditions

Conspecifics – organisms of the same species

References and Recommended Reading

Balcombe, J.P. Vocal recognition of pups by mother Mexican free-tailed bats, Tadarida brasiliensis mexicana . Animal Behaviour 39 , 960-966 (1990). Berglund, J., Rosenqvist G. and Bernet P. Ornamentation predicts reproductive success in female pipefish. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 40 , 145-150 (1997). Clutton-Brock, T., Albon S., Gibson S. & Guinness F. The logical stag: Adaptive aspects of fighing in the red deer. Animal Behaviour 27 , 211-225 (1979). de Waal F.B.M. Food sharing and reciprocal obligations among chimpanzees. Journal of Human Evolution 18 , 433–459 (1989).

Hauser, M. 1997. The Evolution of Communication . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Lloyd, J.E. Aggressive mimicry in Photuris: signal repertoires by femmes fatales. Science 197 , 452-453 (1975).

Marler, P. Characteristics of some animal calls. Nature 176 , 6-8 (1955). Martinez Well, M. & Henry C.S. The role of courtship songs in reproductive isolation among populations of green lacewings of the genus Chrysoperla . Evolution 46 , 31-43 (1992). McCracken, G.F. Communal nursing in Mexican free-tailed bat maternity colonies. Science 223 , 1090-1091(1984).

Rabin, L.A., McCowan B., Hooper S.L & Owings D.H. Anthropogenic noise and its effect on animal communication: an interface between comparative psychology and conservation biology. International Journal of Comparative Psychology 16 , 172-192 (2003). Ryan M.J., Tuttle M.D., & Rand A.S. Sexual advertisement and bat predation in a neotropical frog. American Naturalist 119 , 136–139 (1982). Schneider, D. The sex attractant receptors of moths. Scientific American 231 , 28-35 (1974). Seyfarth, R.M., Cheney D.L. & Marler P. Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: Evidence for predator classification and semantic communication. Science 210 , 801-803 (1980). Smith, D. The role of the epaulets in the red-winged blackbird, ( Agelaius phoeniceus ) social system. Behaviour 41 , 251-268 (1972).

Vehrencamp, S.L., Bradbury J.W., & Gibson R.M. The energetic cost of display in male sage grouse. Animal Behaviour 38 , 885-896 (1989). von der Emde, G. Electroreception. In D. H. Evans (ed.). The Physiology of Fishes , pp. 313-343. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press (1998). Wilson, E.O. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1975).

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Why animals talk

Dr Arik Kershenbaum is decoding animal communication.

By Liam Morgan

Dr Arik Kershenbaum at Girton

Deep in the jungle, voices speak. No-one has heard these voices for decades. Many assumed they were lost forever. Trekking through the mountains of northern Vietnam, you can hear the voices for a long time before spying their source.

Call of the Cao Vit Gibbon

One thing strikes you, as you listen to the hoots and howls of the voices. They are clearly intentional. They are a mark of an intelligence separate from your own, lurking in the canopy above your head, swinging with laughable ease between the trees, making a mockery of your harsh journey. “It is an incredibly haunting, beautiful song,” says Dr Arik Kershenbaum, Cambridge zoologist, Girton Fellow, and pursuer of the Cao Vit Gibbon. “For me, it brings home how truly rich the communication of other species is.” When animals talk, Kershenbaum is all ears. By listening to animals in their natural habitats, he teases apart the messages they send one another, and reveals the driving forces behind their communication. His work challenges our preconceptions about what animals are capable of, while also reaffirming what makes humans truly unique. Primates like the Cao Vit Gibbon are special. A perfect storm of evolutionary conditions has made them both intelligent and communicative. They feed on fruit trees in the jungle: a scarce and capricious resource. They have to remember when a given fruit is ripe, where it is, and compete with other animals to get there first. In order to do this, they work as a team, giving information to each other about food sources and their own whereabouts. By cooperating in this way, their hoots and howls have become richly layered and nuanced. Kershenbaum studies wild species on their own terms. He thinks their communication can tell us about how they came to be, and how they are different from us. “We have to be careful not to think of animals having a language that we can translate. They are sending messages. But it’s not language. If we try to understand their communication as if it were human language, all we’re doing is imposing our own nature on them.”

Marking the territory

In a careful distinction, Kershenbaum specialises in animal communication, not ‘animal language’. This linguistic landscape has been scouted, criticised and fought over, like the murkier regions of a dense forest. Linguists disagree on how distinct the boundary should be between ‘communication’ and ‘language’. Arik marks his own territory: “All animals communicate. If you move around, you need some way to send signals to others of your species. You also need the ability to sense your environment and pick up all kinds of signals. “What we call ‘language’ in humans is very different to what animals do. Humans can communicate an unlimited number of concepts. There’s no other animal we know of that does that. “There may be other species out there that have the capacity to do what we do, but they don’t seem to be doing it in the wild.” Why not? Because they don’t need to. Animals are adapted to survive in ecological niches. For a given trait to endure, it needs to help them survive. Arik thinks we should be careful in assuming that traits which have helped humans would be helpful to other animals. They are doing just fine without language. Enlightenment philosophers drove a wedge between humans and other animals. They preserved our uniqueness by denying similarities between us and other creatures. Descartes labelled animals ‘automata’ - mindless machines playing out simple routines, running on clockwork instincts, with no inner lives to speak of. Until the 20th century, scientists mainly studied animal behaviour in reductionist settings. They created sterile mazes and encouraged rats to complete them. They placed wild animals in controlled environments and picked apart their workings. For Kershenbaum, this approach ignores the full range of animal behaviour, and distorts our assessment of their character. “It is the complexity of the environment around biological creatures that makes them act the way they do. By not studying how animals exist in the wild, we ignored their context: a 4-billion-year interaction between species and environment.” What can animals in the wild tell us about their communication? There’s only one way to find out.

Arik with a meerkat

Arik with a colleague in the snowy wilds

Arik with a wolf

Into the wild

In the water with dolphins, you are out of your element. And they know it. “Dolphins are clearly intelligent,” Kershenbaum says, recalling his time swimming with them. “They’re very interested in you. They’re aware that in this underwater environment, you’re pathetic. You can barely swim, compared to their abilities.”

Five dolphin whistles

Dolphins are the only animals we know of that give each other names. They play games with one another, like ‘catch the fish’ and ‘tag, you’re it’ . But communicating underwater is a steep challenge. In such a noisy environment, transmitting information over longer distances is fraught with difficulty. With a series of clicks, dolphins can ‘see’ in sonar - an ability known as echolocation. At close range, they can chat comfortably , but have to adapt the sounds they make when sending messages over long distances. A surprising parallel can be found in another species Kershenbaum studies: wolves. Wolves share the dolphins’ problem of reliably transferring information in a confusing environment. “Dolphins and wolves have a lot in common. Long-range communication has some physical constraints: a lot of nuanced information is lost when you send an acoustic signal over long distances. That’s the same if you’re trying to communicate from one mountaintop to another, or trying to call your dolphin friend several leagues away. “Both dolphins and wolves have evolved a much simpler, robust use of acoustics to overcome these physical restraints on long-range communication.” This is why wolves howl. Howls are adapted to travel. They remain detectable and distinct over long distances. As far as Kershenbaum can tell, howls fulfil at least three different roles: marking out territory, keeping in touch with other pack members, and, adorably, satisfying the animal's love of howling.

Eastern Timber Grey Wolf howl

Whether this kind of long-range communication lacks the subtlety and complexity required for what we call language is contentious. Ian Roberts , Professor of Theoretical Linguistics at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics, thinks that the systems Kershenbaum describes are limited. “Human languages all rely on two separate systems,” Roberts says. “The first combines meaningless sounds into meaningful sentences. The second combines meaningful words into potentially unlimited sentences. The communication systems Arik describes don’t seem to work in this way.” Kershenbaum is less convinced that all potential languages would need words and sentences. He remains open-minded on animals’ ability to communicate information, even if long-range methods demand more basic messages. There does seem to be more information transmitted in the short-range communication of animals, even if we can’t call it ‘language’. Dolphins and wolves have this kind of short-range communication (whistles, barks and growls), but studying this poses a greater challenge. Getting close enough to eavesdrop on a wolf pack isn’t usually possible. One animal that Kershenbaum has got closer to is the hyrax. Hyraxes are small, rotund, furry mammals, who live in large groups. Their songs are long and loud. As Kershenbaum found out, their calls have specific meanings. “Hyraxes keep guard. One of them keeps a lookout for predators, and calls out when one is sighted. Depending on the type of call, the group can come together to mob this potential predator. “In a particular case, I was doing some research close to a hyrax colony. I played a recording of a hyrax distress call, and they all came running at me. There were about 20, and they were very threatening.

Call of the hyrax

“This just illustrates that communication in the social context plays an adaptive role. It's really important to be able to say ‘here's a predator, come and help me’, and that needs to be a different call from ‘I see a predator, run and hide’. It becomes very clear that hyrax messages have different meanings.” More widely, the problem of understanding meaning in animal communication is daunting and controversial. “Animals convey a lot of information in their communication, but it’s probably encoded very differently to how we do things. They almost certainly do not use an equivalent of words, for example. Before you can hope to understand what they’re saying, you have to understand where the information is. These are not trivial problems.” To help with this thorny information task, groups like Earth Species Project and Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) are developing new algorithms and machine learning techniques. Kershenbaum acknowledges the benefits of these efforts, but sees problems with relying too heavily on data. “If you hope to solve wider problems merely by looking at the data, and not the animals in the wild, you’re wrong. Some things can be done by data alone, but to understand meanings, you have to be able to see the behavioural context. It’s that context that drives all communication.” “Pitching such efforts as ‘translation’ is misleading. There isn’t a word-to-word correlation between different animals’ communication. But we should use new technologies to figure out what information is in there - and that’s very valuable.”

"By not studying how animals exist in the wild, we ignored their context: a 4-billion-year interaction between species and environment.”

Dr Arik Kershenbaum

Arik in the grounds at Girton

Our 'infinite faculty'

Life on this planet evolved horns, fur and flying far before it evolved human language. Why did it take 4 billion years? There are no fossils of language. If evolution had taken a different path, we might never have evolved language at all. Tracking just how it happened is incredibly difficult. Two camps within linguistics have their own explanations. The ‘one giant leap’ camp, spurred on by the ideas of Noam Chomsky , think that our syntactic mastery arrived in an evolutionary instant. A glorious moment, where perhaps even a single mutation endowed a lucky ape with the ‘infinite faculty’ of human language. Conversely, the ‘step by step’ folk think that the biological endowments necessary for language evolved slowly over time, gradually cascading into the rich linguistic abilities we enjoy today. Arik wants to emphasise the middle ground between the two camps. “Neither of these approaches is likely to be completely right. What I don’t think anyone would deny is that our ancestors had the potential for language, in a way that other animals do not. “6 million years ago, our ancestor species lived in the forest. In navigating a complex environment and cooperating in large groups, they were probably already developing a sophisticated social intelligence. That intelligence meant they had the potential to make use of language, should a helpful mutation come along. “I think the most compelling narrative is that greater social intelligence led to greater communicative complexity, which then led to further social intelligence… a reinforcing evolutionary loop, going back and forth over a long time.”

Arik and colleagues in Vietnam

So what abilities might underlie the successful evolution of language? Pointing to uniquely human abilities proves tougher than you might think. “Perspective-taking is almost certainly required for language. All communication evolves because one animal wants to influence another, though that doesn't necessarily mean that the first animal understands that the other animal's behaviour will change, after receiving their message. “That understanding appears to be rare in the animal kingdom. Humans have it. Chimpanzees and dolphins might have it. “Abstraction - the ability to form representations - is also necessary for language, but doesn’t seem to be unique to humans. Abstraction and perspective-taking are part of a suite of ideas that came together and made the human language phenomenon.” The ability to understand others, and project ourselves inside their heads, seems to be at the core of human language. But researchers are still debating precisely what allows us to make use of, in William von Humboldt’s words, ‘infinite use of finite means’ . In the future, Kershenbaum hopes to use his insights into animal communication to help with conservation . With a fuller understanding of what animals are saying, we could track them better in the wild, and monitor their behaviour. Elsewhere, Cambridge researchers are leading the study of animal communication in surprising directions. Dr James Herbert-Read investigates how marine animals gather information from their environment , while researchers from many departments have debated how languages might sound on other planets . Listening to what animals are saying has profound implications. In the haunting song of the gibbon and the yearning howl of the wolf, there are nuanced, intentional messages that we are only now beginning to decode. By paying careful attention, our appreciation of animal lives is deepened, while our own place in the natural world is both secured and granted further mystery. Arik’s work could tell us how other species think, where we came from, and why we talk.

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Published on 28 August 2024

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Introduction

Senders and receivers

Signal production
Signal transmission
Signal reception
Costs and benefits of communication
Evolution of signals
Signal design rules
Honesty and deceit

animal communication

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Khan Academy - Animal communication
animal communication - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
Table Of Contents

Animals communicate by sending and receiving signals. For example, a mother dingo (Canis lupus dingo) can communicate certain types of information to her pups by using tactile signals conveyed through grooming.

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animal communication , process by which one animal provides information that other animals can incorporate into their decision making . The vehicle for the provision of this information is called a signal. The signal may be a sound , colour pattern, posture, movement, electrical discharge , touch , release of an odorant, or some combination of these mediums.

Animals face daily decisions about how to behave. Choices can be as simple as a sea anemone deciding when to expand its tentacles or as complex as a male lion deciding whether to approach a reluctant mate. The decision, which may be reflexive or conscious, is guided by evolutionary biases based on alternative outcomes of choice, recent experience about likely conditions, and sensory information. An animal with access to complete information can always choose correctly. However, life is rarely so accommodating, and inputs often fail to provide complete information. Thus, communication is an important source of additional information that is incorporated into the decision-making process.

Signals are actions or anatomical structures whose primary function is the provision of information to another animal. However, not all actions by one animal that provide information to another animal qualify as signals. The noise created by a foraging mouse and used by an owl to locate and kill the mouse is a case in point. Mice have to feed, and the noises they create while feeding (e.g., through movement and chewing) are an inadvertent result of that activity. Thus, these sounds are not a signal. In contrast, the song of a wren is not inadvertent—wrens sing solely to communicate with other birds .

Observe an impala herd communicate via grooming, freezing reflexes, prancing, and sprinting

An animal that provides a signal is called a sender. The animal to which the signal is directed is the receiver. The receiver uses the signal information to help make a decision. For example, if a receiver must choose either to fight with or to flee from an opponent, it brings to this decision biases and thresholds passed on to it by successful prior generations. This information helps the receiver avoid harm and find food, shelter, and mates. Prior experience in the receiver’s own life may also play a role in shaping its evaluation of the situation. If it has routinely lost fights to larger animals, a useful strategy would be to assess the size of the opponent. This may be done by using vision or other means. For example, in some cases an opponent broadcasts a low-frequency sound signal at the receiver. Because only large animals can produce low-frequency sounds, this signal provides evidence that the opponent is large. The receiver integrates its perception of the sound frequency with its prior experience and inherited avoidance of harmful situations and thus decides to flee.

In this example, the receiver can interpret the signal only if it understands that low-frequency sounds tend to be associated with large body sizes. The association between alternative signals (e.g., sounds of different frequencies) and different alternative circumstances (e.g., relative sizes of opponents) is called a code. Codes can be characterized as probabilities that a sender will emit a given signal in any given circumstance. In a perfect code, only one signal will be used in a given context , and only one context will evoke that signal. Real codes do not need to be perfect, but they do need to be good enough that a receiver attending to signals makes better decisions than if it ignored the signals and relied only on other sources of information.

Animals differ widely in the mechanisms by which they acquire signal codes. Some codes are inherited genetically. For example, the sound-producing structures of many male insects generate a limited range of sound frequencies, and the ears of females are pretuned to be most sensitive to those frequencies. In other species, senders’ sounds or body odours are determined by random genetic processes, and receivers must learn which signals go with which individuals. Many songbirds have genetic limits on the range of sounds they can sing, but they can learn one or more local variants within those limits during a short period in their youth. In certain species, such as parrots or humans, both sender and receiver must learn the appropriate vocal coding, and they can continue to learn alternative coding systems throughout life.

Different contexts require different kinds of information and thus different signals. The number of signals in a species’ repertoire can range from 5 or 6 in the simplest nonsocial animals to 10–20 in social insects , such as bees and ants , or to 30–40 in social vertebrates , such as wolves and primates . Most animals produce signals to attract mates and then produce additional signals to synchronize mating. Signals for mediating conflicts, including signals of aggressive intention and signals of submission, are also widespread. In addition, territorial species require signals for declaring territory ownership, and in situations in which adults guard or feed their young, both parents and offspring require signals to coordinate parental care. Social animals may use signals to coordinate group movements, to assemble dispersed group members, or to display social affiliations. Some animals have special signals that they use to share food finds, to alert others about predator attacks, and even to alert approaching predators that they have been detected. In addition, bats , oilbirds , porpoises , and electric fish use the differences between their own emitted and subsequently received signals to extract information about the ambient environment . In many of these contexts, the relevant animal signals are designed to provide a receiver with ancillary information about the identity, sex, social affiliation, and location of the sender.

Home / Essay Samples / Science / Zoology / Animal Communication

Animal Communication Essay Examples

Whether animals have language.

The question of whether animals have language is a contentious issue; for example, it is debatable whether parrots utilize human language. It is also controversial whether animals communicate with one another. However, to define the human language is distinguished by six unique qualities, which include...

Animal Communication: Methods and Types of Communication

Animal communication happens when one animal transmits information to another animal using some kind of change in the animal that gets the information and it is usually between animals of the same species or maybe between two animals of different species. The animal communication system...

Birdsong as a Means of Communication

The process of animal communication has been a subject of study for many years. The current study aimed to examine in particular, birdsong as a means of communication and also its numerous functions. The two main focus points discussed are the functions of birdsong in...

Language and Communication in Animals

Many species can communicate with one another although they have very distinct means of communication. Communication has often been used as a characteristic to define what makes us human. There are many ways of communicating with an individual, such as talking or hand signals. Any...

The Similarity of Human Language and Animal Communication

Language is an ability so deeply rooted in the existence of human life that it is challenging to envisage a world without it. It has the power to influence the way humans think and is widely believed to be distinct to them. Examining human language...

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