Animal communication
grrlscientist | November 14, 2008tags: neurobiology, neuroscience, animal communication, birdsong, premotor nucleus HVC, brain temperature, neural circuitry, motor behaviors, bioacoustics
Captive-bred Zebra Finch, Taeniopygia guttata, at
Bodelwyddan Castle Aviary, Denbighshire, Wales.
Image: Adrian Pingstone/Wikipedia [larger view].
Birdsong is the primary model system that helps scientists understand how the brain produces complex sequences of learned behavior, such as playing the piano. In songbirds, there are many interconnected brain regions that play specific and important role in the production of song. These…
edyong | November 4, 2008You are the alpha male, the top dog, the grand kahuna. A young upstart is trying to muscle his way onto your turf and compete for your women. Your solution - click your knees loudly at him. It seems like a strange strategy. For humans, a clicking knee would hardly be a sign of strength but it's all part of the bizarre communications of the world's largest antelope - the eland.
Elands bulls have a strict pecking order that determines their access to females in the herd. On the few occasions when they fight, they hardly ever use their dangerous horns and hooves, preferring instead to prove…
edyong | October 22, 2008
Humans are a funny lot. While we seem to be relentless voyeurs, we generally frown on eavesdropping as an invasion of privacy. But in the animal world, eavesdropping can be a matter of life or death. Animals rarely communicate in isolation. Often it pays for one species to monitor the dialogues of others, particularly when predator warnings are involved.
Small animals in particular do well to pay attention to the alarms of other species, as they are often preyed upon by the same larger hunters. Even very unrelated species can listen in and understand each other's signals. Vervet monkeys…
edyong | September 29, 2008
Two strangers are having a normal conversation in the middle of a large crowd. No one else can see them. No one else can listen in. Thanks to advanced gadgetry, they are talking in coded messages that only they can decipher. These invisible conversationalists sound like they've walked out of a Bond film. But they are entirely real, and their skill at secrecy is biological, not technological. They are squid.
Squid and their relatives, the octopus and cuttlefish, are masters of concealment. They have the most sophisticated camouflage abilities in the animal kingdom and use them to avoid…
edyong | July 31, 2008They say that all's fair in love and war, and that certainly seems to be the case of Atlantic mollies (Poecilia mexicana). These freshwater fish are small and unassuming, but in their quest to find the best mates, they rely on and Machiavellian misdirection.
The males always prefer larger females but not if they are being watched. Under the voyeuristic gaze of a rival male, Atlantic mollies will either feign disinterest or direct their attentions toward a smaller, less attractive female.
Deception is par for the course in the animal kingdom. Plovers will try to lure predators away from…
edyong | July 17, 2008New Scientist's Feedback section has a running series of items on "nominative determinism", that strange phenomenon where a person's bears eerie witness to their occupation, such as a neurologist called Lord Brain, or an article on urology authored by Splatt and Weedon. Well here's another example for them - a new paper about a singing fish from a scientist called Bass.
Beyond the wall-mounted horrors of Big Mouth Billy, fish are not exactly known for their vocal stylings, but one group - the toadfishes and midshipmans - are very noisy indeed. They make a range of dull grunts and hums by…
edyong | June 25, 2008If you listen to the egg of a crocodile, you can tell when it's going to hatch by the small squeaks coming out of it. The squeaks come from the unborn babies and sound like "umph! umph! umph!". These calls are common to all crocodilians and while zoologists have always suspected that they serve a specific purpose, until now, no one had ever tested this theory with an experiment.
Amelie Vergne and Nicoals Mathevon at the Universite Jean Monnet are the first to do so and they show that the youngsters call to tell their siblings that it's time to hatch. And given that Nile crocodiles bury…
edyong | June 18, 2008In my last post, I wrote about how chimpanzees console one another to reduce the stress of violent confrontations. Conflict and competition are clearly important parts of chimp life and never more so than when sex is involved. The second study this week on the social lives of chimps demonstrates one of the strategies that female chimps use to avoid competition in some cases, and stir it up in others.
It comes down to sex calls - distinctive calls that female chimps make while mating. New research shows that they do this to advertise their availability to other males and garner both sperm and…
edyong | May 1, 2008 Ultraviolet (UV) radiation lies beyond the violet end of the rainbow. Our eyes aren't equipped to see it and its presence only becomes visually apparent when enough of it hits our skin and causes a painful, red patch - a sunburn. But not all animals have eyes that are so ill-equipped. The females of the jumping spider Phintella vittata not only see UV light, they also find it sexy.
UV light may be invisible to us but many animals can see it and use it to communicate. Sometimes, this is deliberate, as in the case of blue tits using UV patches to seduce females. It can also be inadvertent…
edyong | March 31, 2008You might not be that impressed to receive a clump of grass or branches on a first date, but a boto dolphin might think differently. A new study suggests that these Amazonian dolphins wave bits of flotsam to attract mates.
The boto is a freshwater river dolphin that swims through the currents of the Amazon and the Orinoco. They are elusive creatures that are difficult to study, so very little is known about their social lives.
Tony Martin from the University of St Andrews spent three years in the Amazonian Mamiraua reserve studying the behaviour of botos. During this time, he spotted over…
edyong | March 27, 2008My first ever feature article has just been published in this week's issue of New Scientist. It's about the ways in which songbirds are coping with the noisy din of cities. Low-frequency urban noises mask the calls that they use to attract mates, defend territories and compete with rivals. The race to adapt to this new soundscape has already seen some losers being forced out and some winners developing some intriguing strategies to cope with the clamour.
Robins have started to sing at night when it's quieter, while nightingales just belt out their tunes more loudly (breaking noise safety…
edyong | March 26, 2008Would you gamble on a safe bet for the promise of something more? Would you risk losing everything for the possibility of greater rewards? In psychological experiments, humans tend to play it safe when we stand to gain something - we're more likely to choose a certain reward over a larger but riskier one. Now, we're starting to understand how our two closest relatives deal with risk - bonobos, like us, tend to be risk-averse while chimpanzees usually play the odds.
Sarah Heilbronner from Harvard University studied the attitudes of five chimps and five bonobos to risky decisions. All the…
edyong | March 21, 2008Eagles may be famous for their vision, but the most incredible eyes of any animal belong to the mantis shrimp. Neither mantises nor shrimps, these small, pugilistic invertebrates are already renowned for their amazingly complex vision.
Now, a group of scientists have found that they use a visual system that's never been seen before in another animal, and it allows them to exchange secret messages.
Mantis shrimps are no stranger to world records. They are famous for their powerful forearms, which can throw the fastest punch on the planet. The arm can accelerate through water at up to 10,000…
edyong | February 28, 2008
Chimpanzees may not be able to recite Hamlet or giving rousing speeches but there is no doubt that they are excellent communicators. They exchange a wide variety of sophisticated calls and gestures that carry meaning and can be tailored to different audiences.
The sophistication of chimp communication doesn't stop there. Jared Taglialatela from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center has found that chimp signals and human speech are both strongly influenced by the same area in the left half of the brain - a region called the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).
In humans, the left IFG is home…