Canines as wolves and coyotes may adopt an aggressive posture, such as growling with their teeth bared, to indicate they will fight if necessary, and rattlesnakes use their well-known rattle to warn potential predators of their poisonous bite ; and on a rainy night concert of a frog fills the darkness.. these are but few examples of the way animals communicate. Sounds of nature are all around us.Some are funny, while some threatening . Are they coded messages ? Is it possible that they are using a language ?
Language is defined as a form of symbolic and creative communication . Animals use communication to attract mates, warn off predators, mark territory,to exchange information about food sources and to identify themselves. The study of animal communication is called zoosemiotics .
The sender and receiver of a communication may be of the same species or of different species. The majority of animal communication is intra specific (between two or more individuals of the same species). However, there are some important instances of inter specific communication as warning colouration , mimicry , stotting, etc.
Some predators communicate to prey in ways that change their behaviour and make them easier to catch, in effect deceiving them.
Inter species communication also occurs in various kinds of mutualism and symbiosis.
Various ways in which humans interpret the behaviour of domestic animals, or give commands to them, fit the definition of inter specific communication.
Another important forms of communication is bird song, usually performed mainly by males. It is just the best known case of vocal communication; other instances include the warning cries of many monkeys, the territorial calls of gibbons, and the mating calls of many species of frog.
IMITATION OF HUMANS
I guess the most fascinating to us are the animals that can imitate our speech - as parrots.They are so good at imitation that every sound we say they are capable of repeating it .Could it be a genuine form of communication ?
A psychologist Irene Pepperberg has bee trying to answer this question.She started with with very simple words as cork and carrot and then started teaching a grey parrot simple sentences.Soon it could respond to questions as What colour is the box ?. Now the parrot has the ability to distinguish between more than 300 objects by form , size and colour.
FORMS OF ANIMALS COMMUNICATION
It has been observed that all animal communication can be divided into :
Visual / Optical Communication - such as patterns of fur, colour change or sign language.
Auditory / Acoustic Communication - animals make lots of different sounds to communicate, as singing shouting ,ultra- or infra- sound calls. From the roar of a lion to the song of the whale, sound is a way for animals to "talk" to other animals.
Tactile Communication - animals use touch in many different ways. When a cat rubs up against you or a dog offers you its paw, they are communicating. Chicks beg food from their parents using this form .
Chemical Communication - animals emit certain chemicals and odours from them conveys the message, many animals mark their paths and territories this way ,as dogs.
Electrical Communication - sometimes animals , esp. some fishes send electrical signals to improve orientation.
EXAMPLES FROM NATURE
These are some examples of animal communication :
Species such as wasps that are capable of harming potential predators are often brightly coloured, and this modifies the behaviour of the predator, who either instinctively or as the result of experience will avoid attacking such an animal.
Hover flies are coloured in the same way as wasps, and although they are unable to sting, the strong avoidance of wasps by predators gives the hover fly some protection. This is an example of MIMICRY for protection.
In certain species of amphibians which have a brightly coloured belly, but on which the rest of their body is coloured to blend in with their surroundings. When confronted with a potential threat, they show their belly, indicating that they are poisonous in some way.
Some antelopes such as Thomson's gazelle in the presence of a predator run in a particular fashion , referred to as stotting ; it has been argued that this demonstrates to the predator that the particular prey individual is fit and healthy and therefore not worth pursuing.
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 (pecking at the red spot), 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.
However ,my favourite is the amazingly sophisticated communication that takes place among the honey-bees. When one of them discovers a source of food ,it returns to the hive and passes on the information.This is done by certain dances.Now here's the amazing part :If the food is located less than 100 m from the hive , the bee will dance around in a circle .If the distance is more , it becomes a waggling dance, in the form of figure of eight. The speed is supposed to indicate the distance of food. The orientation of the dance gives the direction of food.The bee through its dancing also reports the richness of the food to be found !!
Auditory / Acoustic Communication - animals make lots of different sounds to communicate, as singing shouting ,ultra- or infra- sound calls. From the roar of a lion to the song of the whale, sound is a way for animals to "talk" to other animals.
Tactile Communication - animals use touch in many different ways. When a cat rubs up against you or a dog offers you its paw, they are communicating. Chicks beg food from their parents using this form .
Chemical Communication - animals emit certain chemicals and odours from them conveys the message, many animals mark their paths and territories this way ,as dogs.
Electrical Communication - sometimes animals , esp. some fishes send electrical signals to improve orientation.
EXAMPLES FROM NATURE
These are some examples of animal communication :
Species such as wasps that are capable of harming potential predators are often brightly coloured, and this modifies the behaviour of the predator, who either instinctively or as the result of experience will avoid attacking such an animal.
Hover flies are coloured in the same way as wasps, and although they are unable to sting, the strong avoidance of wasps by predators gives the hover fly some protection. This is an example of MIMICRY for protection.
In certain species of amphibians which have a brightly coloured belly, but on which the rest of their body is coloured to blend in with their surroundings. When confronted with a potential threat, they show their belly, indicating that they are poisonous in some way.
Some antelopes such as Thomson's gazelle in the presence of a predator run in a particular fashion , referred to as stotting ; it has been argued that this demonstrates to the predator that the particular prey individual is fit and healthy and therefore not worth pursuing.
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 (pecking at the red spot), 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.
However ,my favourite is the amazingly sophisticated communication that takes place among the honey-bees. When one of them discovers a source of food ,it returns to the hive and passes on the information.This is done by certain dances.Now here's the amazing part :If the food is located less than 100 m from the hive , the bee will dance around in a circle .If the distance is more , it becomes a waggling dance, in the form of figure of eight. The speed is supposed to indicate the distance of food. The orientation of the dance gives the direction of food.The bee through its dancing also reports the richness of the food to be found !!
The chief characteristic of animal communication is that every signal corresponds to only one message , and vice versa.To decide whether animals communicate by using language , scientists will have to decide the basic features of a language. 
2 comments:
Ya i think animals communicate.. n they probably are better at it.It is our species that does not communicate well enough, lives in an artificial habitat with arbitrary social taboos, and discourages natural curiosity in children (”shame-shame”).
I am writing a research paper over weather animals use language or not. Im arguing that they do not. There can be communication without a languague such as a cat hissing or a dog growling, but in the case of the parrot is that really communication? is it speaking its mind? NO what it really is doing is speaking what it has been tought. I'm looking for facts to back my opinon its hard when everything says that animals do have language but there are 7 things that a language must have and everything i have found has not mentioned a single one therefore it can't be a language if it doesn't fit thee 7 characteristics.
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