Essay
What do animal studies tell us about communication and/or language?
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Essay of 8 pages for the course Neuroscience And Behaviour at UON
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What do animal studies tell us about communication?Communication has been defined as “a stylised signal or display by one individual,
modifying the response of another” (Barnard, 2004, p. 534), and involves a signal, signaller
and receiver. It is argued that “signallers must intend to influence the response of a recipient
in order for their actions to qualify as communication” (Barnard, 2004, p. 534). This essay
will discuss findings from a range of animal studies, demonstrating multiple types of
communication with different functions, in order to investigate whether animal interaction
shows intention and can thus be classed as true communication. Most of the reasons for
animal communication come under survival and reproduction, namely mate attraction,
obtaining food, establishing dominance, and alerting others of predators, however
communicating for play will also be considered. Four types of communication will be
discussed in turn (auditory, visual, chemical, and tactile), in order to argue whether animal
studies show that signaller and receiver interaction is intentional.
Karl von Frisch (as cited by Munz, 2005) discovered that honeybees use a form of visual
communication to indicate to fellow bees the location of food: they use the sun to perform a
‘round dance’ for food sources less than 100 metres away and a ‘waggle dance’ for sources
more than 100m away. He found the rate of waggling indicates the distance of the food
source and the angle of the waggle run indicates the bearing. The fact they adapt the signal
depending on the location of food, implies the signal is intentional. However, some were
sceptical of this, stating that very few bees are recruited from the dance and many bees fly to
the source having not seen the dance. Wenner, Wells, and Johnson (1969) argued that bees
use odour to communicate about food instead. They found that bees flew to a location marked
by food odour, rather than a location indicated by a dance. If this is the case, the signal
appears unintentional as it seems the bees do not deliberately carry the smell of the food back
, with them. To test this, Riley et al. (2005) set up an unscented feeder. Bees found the source,
flew back to the hive and performed a dance. Some of the recruited bees were fitted with a
transponder to track their flight. When released, they flew straight to the source. Some bees
were released from a different location and still flew for the right distance in the right
direction to the unscented feeder. This shows bees use the dance, rather than odour, to
indicate the distance and direction of food. Therefore, more recent research with honeybees
provides support that animals can communicate, as the signal seems intentional.
In wasps, a different form of visual display is used to transfer information regarding
dominance. Tibbetts and Dale (2004) found that the more black spots wasps had on their
clypeus (the yellow area between wasps eyes), the more dominant they are. This study only
shows correlation not causation, suggesting other factors could explain the number of black
spots, however the same effect was found even after controlling for the size of the wasps.
Tibbetts and Lindsay (2008) demonstrated that receiver wasps do actually use this signal to
infer dominance. They took two wasps of the same size, both with one dot, but painted over
these so one wasp had no dots and the other had two dots. In 81% of trials, a third wasp
chose to go to a food source guarded by the wasp with no spots on its face. This shows the
number of spots on a wasp’s face does affect the behaviour of the receiver, showing it serves
as a signal to transmit information about dominance. However, this appears to be an
unintentional physical change rather than a deliberate signal and therefore cannot be
considered true communication.
An example of auditory communication is alarm calling, used by vervet monkeys to alert
others of predators. The first to discover this was Struhsaker (1967, as cited by Wynne and
Udell, 2013), who proposed that vervet monkeys had 21 messages they used to communicate
with one another. He found they produce a distinct call for different predators, which causes
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