Questions tagged [communication]
Behaviours that transfer information between organisms
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Are animals that can make facial expressions more visually communicative?
This is more like a shower thought but I was really interested in finding an answer. If this is the case, I would like sources that support this and gives reasons to why this may be the case. In the ...
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Evolutionarily, why do some animals perceive eye contact as a sign of aggression?
It's said that species like dogs and bears perceive eye contact as a sign of aggression. Primates -- including us humans, in many of the world's cultures -- use eye contact in this way as well, to the ...
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Why does the blend of many cicadas sound lower-pitched than individual nearby ones?
In the last emergence of Brood XIX, I noticed that the nearby cicadas made individual chittering sounds that you could hear against a more distant background of a warbling "flying saucer" ...
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Are there animals which produce sound through direct muscular oscillation?
Obviously, muscles are involved in producing sound, but usually not directly. I.e., the muscles that control human vocal cords do not actually vibrate the vocal cords--a different set of muscles ...
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Could an animal have a developed Broca's area but no Wernicke's area?
Broca's area's function is for speech production, specifically, the control of muscular movement for speech, and Wernicke's area's function is the comprehend language or communication, Communication ...
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Is DNA a Language? [duplicate]
I’ve been thinking about attributes that are unique to humans (not just far more developed in humans than other species) and aside from trivial things like chins, the only ones I can think of are art ...
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Can whales send each other [3D] images?
Russell Arnott, apparently an oceanographer, who currently works as a project manager at the Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge University (UK), wrote in his piece Whales and Waves (2016, p.2):
New ...
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Should soundscape ecology be a component of STEM education? [closed]
I'd like to see soundscape ecology be included in STEM education. I realize there is so much to teach and so little time, but think that primary and secondary students would be highly motivated and ...
user70541
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Do animals lie?
Have there been any studies that show or suggest that species known to be able to communicate information between individuals ever intentionally communicate false information i.e. lie?
(Apart from ...
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Waggle dance in the dark
Karl von Frisch discovered waggle dance [1] as communication system when bees talk about feed resources;
Long story short, using a polar coordinate system, bees dance to reveal flowers to sisters.
My ...
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Do ants know the direct (approximately shortest) path to their nest from the food morsel?
I've been studying a bit on the foraging habits of ants, and one of the things I'm not clear on is whether ants know the shortest path from the food that they find to their nest. I understand that ...
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Are there any animals that are unable to hear the human voice?
Humans and animals have different hearing ranges. The frequency range of a human, for example, is stated with 20 Hz to 20 kHz, whereas the fundamental voice frequency is stated with 125 Hz for men, ...
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Do any non-human species have juveniles that cannot communicate with adults?
Human babies take 1+ years to begin learning how to speak (though sign language can be learned a bit earlier1).
I know that cries, yells, and other non-linguistic sound are a simple form of ...
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Are there solitary animals communicating with themselves?
I can imagine 3 different kinds of communication between individuals:
Communication between individuals of the same species.
Communication between an individual and another from a different species.
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How exactly does symbolic language for apes work?
I'm talking about the panels with lots of colored symbols on them you sometimes see in documentaries and the like. Apes point at the symbols in a specific order and in this way can communicate with ...
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Can multiple cetacean species communicate?
It seems that individuals within the same species have their own communication, but is there evidence to suggest that individuals from different species are able to communicate?
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Can platypuses communicate via electroreception?
I know at least some electroreceptive fish are capable of basic communication with other members of their species via varying their own bioelectric signals. However, I can't find any information as ...
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Bumble bees and wasps [closed]
Location:India
My father was telling me yesterday that wasps were building a nest over an abandoned store room in our backyard...But he noticed that the wasps were attacked by a bunch of bumblebees......
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Do humans secrete and detect pheremones?
Many animal species are capapble of secreting and also detecting pheremones from members of the same species, which relay messages and signals such as indicating sexual readiness.
Do humans do the ...
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Are we capable to generate sounds of animals to the point that they mistakenly recognize it as members of their species?
From Animal language (Wikipedia), there are many evidences that we can communicate with animals, at least to baboons and dolphins. There is a case that fish moving away when hearing a record of whale ...
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Light signals in the courtship and mating
I am investigating on the emission of signals in the courtship and mating in the animals.
I know that the fireflies emit light signals as a courtship ritual.
Are there other animals that use this ...
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What is the necessary criterion for the maintenance of signaling honesty?
Zahavi's (1975, Journal of Theoretical Biology) handicap principle held that the cost associated with a signal is integral to ensuring that signal is accurate, since dishonest signals would be too ...
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Why does Helium make your voice change?
When we breathe in helium and then speak, our voice changes drastically. Does it happen only due to helium or can happen if we use other gas? What factors of the gas does our voice depend on (like ...
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How do trees communicate in the "Wood Wide Web"?
I read on The New Yorker - The Secrets of the Wood Wide Web that trees communicate with each other through electrical impulses sent through their roots. Through these impulses they can ask other trees ...
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What are some good examples of phonotaxis in plants and other inanimate beings?
Reaction to the sound waves by plants is commonly unobserved. A physical movement or chemical release examples due to phonotaxis would be good to know about.
user4630
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Why should the pharyngeal cavity be essential for articulated speech?
In a lecture, I've been told that one of the signs that homo habilis and homo erectus couldn't speak was that they probably lacked the distinction between oral and pharyngeal cavity. But do we really ...
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Has kin selection enabled the evolution of interspecial communication?
I know animals often imitate specific behaviour (like when they show their teeth to evoke "danger!" in the reciever) as a form of communication. Although, for a fully-fledged language where we can ...
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Are there birds that don't vocalize?
I am wondering whether there are birds that do not vocalize at all.
I know about the distinctions between songs and calls in passeriformes.
I know that there are species that vocalize very little, ...
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How ants handle the huge "data" from multiple pheromone trails?
We know that every single ant produces pheromones to communicate and inform others. When there are millions of ants, how do they handle that many signals without getting confused?
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Which animal that lives in the forest makes this noise?
Which animal makes this noise? Link to audio file
The file was recorded next to a forest in Germany.
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If dolphins can see sound, can they say images?
Dolphins determine their surroundings by listening to echoes. Can they mimic those echoes and communicate it to other dolphins, transmitting an "image"? Does the same go for all echolocators?
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When and How do pacemaker cells develop during the cell aggregation process of Dictyostelium discoideum?
I was reading a paper by Tang & Othmer about oscillations and waves in Dictyostelium discoideum. Under certain condition like starvation period in the life cycle of a Dictyostelium discoideum ...
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Why do we have to exhale (or inhale) in order to speak?
Every time we speak, sing, or make any other kind of advanced noise with our throats, we exhale, or to put it that way, blow air through our throats. Why is this required? After all, speakers do not ...
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How do fish communicate?
Fish, as far as I know (of course there may be exceptions), don't have any vocal organs, despite the fact they are proven to be social. So how do they manage to communicate with each other? On land, ...
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Has DNA communication/interaction at a distance been empirically demonstrated?
I recently had a discussion with a statistician in my school about memory. Among other things, he told me that it has been experimentally demonstrated that when one extracts DNA from any organism and ...
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Why don't birds in flocks fly into each other?
I've seen videos of hundreds of birds flying in the same general direction but creating incredible patterns in the sky seemingly instantaneously! How do they all know in what direction to turn at the ...
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Honeybee decision process: new food, new home, new threat [closed]
I have heard that honeybees send out scouts, then based on the scout reports more bees go then come back and report and so they are supposed to be efficient decision makers.
Can you give as complete ...
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Is there an instinct-driven body language for birds?
Over the last year or so, I've been observing house sparrows, because they are so prevalent in the northeast US cities. I noticed that a lot of sparrows, even in different cities seem to have very ...
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What are the most well-understood vocal animal languages? [closed]
Just as the Bee dance, for a "language", I mean that there are vocal pattens, or "grammar".
In the nature, there are many intelligent animals like human beings.
Bird songs, whale songs, dogs?
In ...
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Have there been attempts to identify Chomsky's "language mutation" in humans?
I'm not versed in either biology or linguistics so please forgive any naiveties I may commit.
I've learned that Noam Chomsky thinks that language is a result of a single genetic mutation in humans. ...
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Can rats pass on memories of a maze to their offspring?
A friend of mine told me once about a documentary movie he saw some years ago. On this movie he saw scientists talking about particular experiment. This experiment involved rats and probably ...
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Is there such thing as Animal non-verbal body language?
Have there been any studies done on the animal use of their bodies to signal, communicate or express their emotions, particularly to members of other species (ex: humans)?
I've been observing a very ...
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Is there a biological basis for different accents?
How did accents first develop? Was it climate dependent? or was it a social behavioural issue?
Is there any biological reason for the development of accents?
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