2.4 Human/animal communication

Various ways in which humans interpret the behaviour of domestic animals, or give commands to them, fit the definition of interspecific communication. Depending on the context, they might be considered to be predator to prey communication, or to reflect forms of commensalism. The recent experiments on animal languageWhile the term animal languages is widely used, most researchers agree that they are not as complex or expressive as the human language. They argue that there are significant differences separating human language from animal communication even at its most are perhaps the most sophisticated attempt yet to establish human/animal communication, though their relation to natural animal communication is uncertain.

3 Intraspecies communication

The majority of animal communication, however, occurs within a single species, and this is the context in which it has been most intensively studied.

3.1 Forms of communication

Most of the following forms of communication can also be used for interspecific communication.

The best known forms of communication involve the display of distinctive body parts, or distinctive bodily movements; often these occur in combination, so a distinctive movement acts to reveal or emphasise a distinctive body part. An example that was important in the history of ethology was the parent Herring GullThe Herring Gull Larus argentatus is a large gull which breeds across North America Europe and Asia. It migrates further south in winter. Some are permanent residents on the lower Great Lakes and the east coast of North America. The taxonomy of the Herrin's presentation of its bill to a chick in the nest. Like many gullPagophila ''Larus ''Rissa ''Creagus ''Xema ''Rhodostethia Gulls are seabirds in the family Laridae and subfamily Lari. They are closely related to the terns, and more distantly to the waders, auks and skimmers. Most gulls belong to the large genus Larus''s, the Herring Gull has a brightly coloured bill, yellow with a red spot on the lower mandible near the tip. When it returns to the nest with food, the parent stands over its chick and taps the bill on the ground in front of it; this elicits a begging response from a hungry chick, which stimulates the parent to regurgitate food in front of it. The complete signal therefore involves a distinctive morphological feature (body part), the red-spotted bill, and a distinctive movement (tapping towards the ground) which makes the red spot highly visible to the chick. Investigations by Niko Tinbergen and his colleagues showed that the red colour of the bill, and its high contrast, are crucial for eliciting the appropriate response from the chick.

Another important forms of communication is bird songBird song refers to the sounds, usually melodious to the human ear, made by many birds of the order Passeriformes as a form of communication. Most song is emitted by male rather than female birds. The avian vocal organ is called the syrinx. The anatomical, usually performed mainly by males, though in some species the sexes sing in alternation (this is called duetting ). Bird song is just the best known case of vocal communication; other instances include the warning cries of many monkeyFor the TV show Monkey see Monkey (TV series Cynomolgus Monkey at Batu Caves, Malaysia A monkey is any member of two of the three groupings of simian primates. These two groupings are the New World and Old World monkeys. Because of their similarity to mons, the territorial calls of gibbons, and the mating calls of many species of frog.

Less obvious (except in a few cases) is olfactory communication. Many mammals, in particular, have glands that generate distinctive and long-lasting smells, and have corresponding behaviours that leave these smells in places where they have been. Often the scented substance is introduced into urine or faeces. Sometimes it is distributed through sweat, though this does not leave a semi-permanent mark as scents deposited on the ground do. Some animals have glands on their bodies whose sole function appears to be to deposit scent marks: for example Mongolian gerbils have a scent gland on their stomachs, and a characteristic ventral rubbing action that deposits scent from it. Golden hamsters and cats have scent glands on their flanks, and deposit scent by rubbing their sides against objects; cats also have scent glands on their foreheads. Bees carry with them a pouch of material from the hive which they release as they reenter, the smell of which indicates if they are a part of the hive and grants their safe entry.

3.2 Functions of communication

While there are as many kinds of communication as there are kinds of social behaviour, a number of functions have been studied in particular detail. They include:

• agonistic interaction: everything to do with contests and aggression between individuals. Many species have distinctive threat displays that are made during competition over food, mates or territory; much bird song functions in this way. Often there is a matched submission display, which the threatened individual will make if it is acknowledging the social dominance of the threatener; this has the effect of terminating the aggressive episode and allowing the dominant animal unrestricted access to the resource in dispute. Some species also have affiliative displays which are made to indicate that a dominant animal accepts the presence of another
• courtship rituals: signals made by members of one sex to attract or maintain the attention of potential mate, or to cement a pair bond . These frequently involve the display of body parts, or the emission of scents or calls, that are unique to the species, thus allowing the individuals to avoid mating with members of another species which would be infertile. Animals that form lasting pair bonds often have symmetrical displays that they pair make to each other: famous examples are the mutual presentation of weed by Great-Crested Grebe s, studied by Julian Huxley, and the triumph displays shown by many species of geese and penguins on their nest sites.
• food-related signals: many animals make "food calls" that attract a mate, or offspring, or members of a social group generally to a food source. When parents are feeding offspring, the offspring often have begging responses (particularly when there are many offspring in a clutch or litter - this is well known in altricial songbirds, for example). Perhaps the most elaborate food-related signal is the dance language of honeybees studied by Karl von Frisch, though von Frisch's interpretation of this is currently controversial.
• alarm calls: signals made in the presence of a threat from a predator, allowing all members of a social group (and often members of other species) to run for cover, become immobile, or gather into a group to reduce the risk of attack.
• metacommunications: signals that modify the meaning of subsequent signals. The best known example is the play face in dogs, which signals that a subsequent aggressive signal is part of a play fight rather than a serious aggressive episode.

3.3 Evolution of communication

The importance of communication is clear from the fact that animals have evolved elaborate body parts to facilitate it. They include some of the most striking structures in the animal kingdom, such as the peacock's tail. Birdsong appears to have not just peripheral but also brain structures entirely devoted to its production. But even the red spot on a herring gull's bill, and the modest but characteristic bowing behaviour that displays it, require evolutionary explanation.

There are two aspects to the required explanation:

• identifying a route by which an animal that lacked the relevant feature or behaviour could acquire it;
• identifying the selective pressure that makes it adaptive for animals to develop structures that facilitate communication, emit communications, and respond to them.

Significant contributions to the first of these problems were made by Konrad Lorenz and other early ethologists. By comparing related species within groups, they showed that movements and body parts that in the primitive forms had no communicative function could be "captured" in a context where communication would be functional for one or both partners, and could evolve into a more elaborate, specialised form. For example, Desmond Morris showed in a study of grass finch es that a beak-wiping response occurred in a range of species, serving a preening function, but that in some species this had been elaborated into a courtship signal.

The second problem has been more controversial. The early ethologists assumed that communication occurred for the good of the species as a whole, but this would require a process of group selection which is believed to be mathematically impossible in the evolution of sexually reproducing animals. It was the fundamental insight of sociobiology that behaviours that benefited a whole group of animals might emerge as a result of selection pressures acting solely on the individual. In the case of communication, an important discussion by John R. Krebs and Richard Dawkins established hypotheses for the evolution of such apparently altruistic or mutualistic communications as alarm calls and courtship signals to emerge under individual selection. This led to the realisation that communication might not always be "honest" (indeed, there are some obvious examples where it is not, as in mimicry). The possibility of evolutionarily stable dishonest communication has been the subject of much controversy, with Amotz Zahavi in particular arguing that it cannot exist in the long term. Sociobiologists have also been concerned with the evolution of apparently excessive signalling structures such as the peacock's tail; it is widely thought that these can only emerge as a result of sexual selection, which can create a positive feedback process that leads to the rapid exaggeration of a characteristic that confers an advantage in a competitive mate-selection situation.

4 Communication and understanding

Ethologists and sociobiologists have characteristically analysed animal communication in terms of more or less automatic responses to stimuli, without raising the question of whether the animals concern understand the meaning of the signals they emit and receive. That is a key question in animal cognition. There are some signalling systems that seem to demand a more advanced understanding. A much discussed example is the use of alarm calls by vervet monkeys. Richard Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney showed that these animals emit different alarm calls in the presence of different predators ( leopards, eagles, and snakes), and the monkeys that hear the calls respond appropriately - but that this ability develops over time, and also takes into account the experience of the individual emitting the call. Metacommunication, discussed above, also seems to require a more sophisticated cognitive process.

5 Animal communication and human behaviour

Another controversial issue is the extent to which humans have behaviours that resemble animal communication, or whether all such communication has disappeared as a result of our linguistic capacity. Some of our bodily features - eyebrows, beards and moustaches, deep adult male voices, perhaps female breasts - strongly resemble adaptations to producing signals. Ethologists such as Iraneaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt have argued that facial gestures such as smiling, grimacing, and the eye-brow flash on greeting are universal human communicative signals that can be related to corresponding signals in other primates. Given the recency with which spoken language has emerged, it is likely that human body language does include some more or less involuntary responses that have a similar origin to the communication we see in other animals.

Humans also often seek to mimic animals' communicative signals in order to interact with the animals. For example, cats have a mild affiliative response involving closing their eyes; humans often close their eyes towards a pet cat to establish a tolerant relationship. Stroking, petting and rubbing pet animals are all actions that probably work through their natural patterns of interspecific communication.

6 External link

• Zoosemiotics: animal communication on the web

Animal communication Dog training and behavior Cats Zoosemiotics

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