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animal communication

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the transfer of information from one or a group of animals (sender or senders) to one or more other animals (receiver or receivers) that affects the current or future behaviour of the receivers

OverviewAI-generated

Animal communication is a subject documented in the "Animal communication" category on Commons. It has been the focus of a podcast episode titled "Wild Talk," which explores words in the wild from the jungles to the prairie. This topic is also referenced by 808 other encyclopedia articles.

The subject appears in a large body of scientific literature, with 40,162 entries found in PubMed under the query "animal communication." The podcast description notes that it provides a taste of these interactions in natural settings.

Synthesized by Vinony from 10 facts across 4 sources: Wikidata, Firecrawl, PubMed, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Research

40,162 papers

via PubMed

Described at

Link to a page describing this subject · not written by Vinony

Wikidata facts

Subclass of
animal behavior
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Commons category
Animal communication
topic's main category
Category:Animal communication
Sources (3)

via Wikidata · CC0

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Animal communication is the transfer of information from one or a group of animals (sender or senders) to one or more other animals (receiver or receivers) that affects the current or future behavior of the receivers. Information may be sent intentionally, as in a courtship display, or unintentionally, as in the transfer of scent from the predator to prey with kairomones. Information may be transferred to an "audience" of several receivers. Animal communication is a rapidly growing area of study in disciplines including animal behavior, sociology, neurology, and animal cognition.

When the information from the sender changes the behavior of a receiver, the information is referred to as a "signal". Signalling theory predicts that for a signal to be maintained in the population, both the sender and receiver should usually receive some benefit from the interaction. Signal production by senders and the perception and subsequent response of receivers are thought to coevolve. Signals often involve multiple mechanisms, e.g., both visual and auditory, and for a signal to be understood, the coordinated behavior of both sender and receiver requires careful study.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “animal communication” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.