BIO SCI 93 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Animal Communication, Semiotics, Waggle Dance

• School: UC-Irvine
• Department: Biological Sciences
• Course: BIO SCI 93
• Professor: Justin Shaffer

Document Summary

Most displays reveal information about the signaler, whether it be fitness, disposition, or location. Representational information imparts information about the environment external to the sender. This is a more complicated form of communication, as it requires first assimilating information about the environment, and then divulging that information to others. The honeybee dance language is an example of representational information, imparting both the distance and the direction from the hive to food. A forager will return from a food source and, by performing a directed series of movements, can inform a second wave of foragers as to the location of the same food source. Acoustic signals are energetically costly, but can travel great distances, degrading with increasing distance. Many animals produce sounds to impart information, however only humans have a well-developed language. There is some evidence that vervet monkeys have a language consisting of three distinct words: snake, eagle, and leopard.