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Animal communication

A vervet monkey has one call for leopards and another for eagles — and the others react correctly with nothing there.

Animals signal through sound, chemistry, vibration, electricity, movement and touch. A few use signals that point at specific things or specific individuals — and none of it is language.

Two questions get merged whenever animal communication is written about, and separating them makes almost everything clearer. The first is *how does the signal travel* — as sound, as a chemical, as a vibration through the ground, as a dance. The second is *what does it carry*. A honey bee’s waggle dance encodes direction and distance with real precision. A vervet monkey has different alarm calls for leopards, eagles and snakes, and other monkeys run into a tree, look up, or look down accordingly, with no predator present. A dolphin answers to a synthetic copy of its own signature whistle with the voice stripped out. Each of those is a genuine result about content. None of them is language, and the gap between "a signal that designates a category" and "a word" is where most overstatement about animal minds happens.

Developed coverage · 85% complete · reviewed 2026-08-09

What this page covers

A capability rather than an organism. Covers signalling wherever it has been directly tested — insects, birds, cetaceans, primates and elephants.

Quick facts

Kind
A capability page, assembled from evidence across species
Channels
Sound, chemical, visual, vibrational, electrical, tactile
Referential signals
Demonstrated in vervet monkeys, dolphins and elephants
Language
Not demonstrated in any species

Where this appears

Every organism below has been linked to this page because the evidence links them. Each one carries its own evidence, and its own limits.

What counts as communication

The definition is stricter than it sounds, and almost everything interesting turns on it.

The short answer

How do you prove an animal is communicating rather than just making a noise?

You take away everything that caused the sound and play the sound on its own. If the listener still behaves as though the cause were there, the information was in the signal. If you only ever watch animals in the presence of the thing they are reacting to, you have proved nothing.

This is the single most useful idea on this page. A monkey that runs up a tree when a leopard alarm sounds may simply have seen the leopard. Record the call, wait until no predator is anywhere nearby, hide a speaker in the grass, and play it: the monkeys run up a tree. Play the eagle alarm instead and the same animals look up and dive into cover. The predator is absent in both cases, so the call is the only thing that could have produced the difference. That design — the playback experiment — is what separates a genuine claim about communication from a correlation in a recording, and it is the standard almost nothing in popular coverage is held to. It also explains why so much of the recent AI work stops short of what the headlines say: finding structure in a recording establishes that structure exists, and says nothing about whether any animal uses it.

Check it for yourself

Diagram

Sender, signal, receiver

The first arrow is easy to observe. The second has to be tested, and almost every dispute in this subject is about whether anybody tested it.

Senderproduces the signalSignalsound, scent, movementReceiverbehaviour changeseasy to observehas to be testedThis is the step a playback experiment exists to checkA pattern in a recording establishes the first arrow. Only the receiver establishes the second.
The same explanation in words

A three-box chain. A sender produces a signal; the signal travels; a receiver changes its behaviour. The first link is labelled easy to observe. The second link is labelled has to be tested, and a note beneath explains that a pattern in a recording establishes only the first link, while only the receiver establishes the second.

A call only counts as carrying information once another animal has been shown to act on it — not when a pattern is found in the recording.

Established

Specialists would state this without hedging. Multiple independent lines of evidence agree.

Demonstrating that a signal transmits information requires evidence of receiver response under conditions where the eliciting stimulus is absent, most commonly by playback. Acoustic covariation between a signal and a context establishes only that the signal is correlated with the context.

Who this applies to
A methodological standard applied across animal communication research, not a fact about a particular species.
Studied in
Animalia
Why we rate it this way, and what the caveats are
EstablishedHigh confidence

This is not an empirical finding so much as the design principle the empirical findings depend on, and it has been the standard in behavioural ecology since the 1980s.

How far it can be extended

The playback design is used across birds, mammals, fish, amphibians and insects, and the same logic governs it in each.

Caveats

  • A failed playback is weak evidence of absence: an animal may perceive a difference and have no reason to act on it in that moment.
  • Playback is difficult or impossible for signals that are chemical, very low frequency, or delivered in physical contact.

Still unanswered

  • How to test receiver responses to signals that cannot be reproduced faithfully, which includes most of the sperm whale and elephant work.

Last reviewed 2026-08-31

The evidence (2 studies)

Diagram

A signal is not the same as a cue

Both carry information. Only one was shaped by evolution to carry it — and the difference is where a great many overstated claims begin.

Signalevolved to be received — both sides benefitA vervet alarm callproduced for listeners, who act on itCueinformation leaks; the sender gains nothingA mouse rustling in leaf litterthe owl hears it; the mouse would rather notBoth carry information. Only one was shaped by evolution to carry it.The distinction matters because a call containing information about X is true of cues,is reported as though it established communication. A plant releasing chemicals when it ischewed is emitting a cue unless something shows the plant benefits from being detected.
The same explanation in words

Two panels. A signal evolved to be received, with a vervet alarm call as the example: produced for listeners who act on it. A cue is information that leaks, with a mouse rustling in leaf litter as the example: the owl hears it and the mouse would rather it did not. Beneath, a note explains that a call containing information about something is true of cues too, and that a plant releasing chemicals when chewed is emitting a cue unless something shows the plant benefits from being detected.

How we know

Playing a monkey a warning about a leopard that is not there

Does an alarm call carry information about which predator is coming, or does the monkey simply see the predator?

Alarm calls given to leopards, eagles and snakes were recorded from wild vervet monkeys in Amboseli. A loudspeaker was hidden in the grass near a group, and a single call played back at a moment when no predator of any kind was present. What the listening monkeys did next was filmed: which way they looked, whether they ran, and where they ran to.

What happened

Each call produced the escape appropriate to its own predator and to no other. Leopard alarms sent monkeys into trees. Eagle alarms made them look up and move into cover. Snake alarms made them stand on their hind legs and scan the ground.

What it shows

The call alone is sufficient. Information about which kind of danger is coming is in the sound, and the monkeys extract it and act on it — which is what it means for a signal to carry information rather than merely to correlate with something.

What it does not show

It does not show that a vervet has a concept of "leopard" that it can use for anything else, and it does not make the call a word. An alternative reading survives this design: each call might convey a different urgency together with a different appropriate escape route, which would produce the same behaviour without anything being designated. What it does establish is the standard — and almost nothing in popular coverage of animal language is held to it.

The controls — what makes this evidence rather than a story
  • No predator present in any trial, so the call is the only thing that could produce the response.
  • The speaker was concealed and the observers positioned so that the animals were not reacting to people.
  • Three call types tested against each other, so each acts as a control for the others — a general alarm would produce the same behaviour for all three.

From Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: evidence of predator classification and semantic communication

Diagram

The experiment this whole subject rests on

Four steps, of which the second is the entire point: remove everything that caused the signal, so that only the signal is left.

How you find out whether a signal means anything to the animal1Recordthe call, in aknown situation2Removeeverything thatcaused it3Replaythe call alone,from a speaker4Measurewhat thelistener does nextStep 2 is the whole experiment.A monkey running up a tree when a leopard alarm sounds shows nothing while the leopard isthere — it may have seen it. Take the leopard away and the call is the only thing that couldproduced the behaviour.What a playback still cannot showThat the animal has a concept, that the signal is a word, or that it could refer to somethingabsent. A failed playback is weak evidence too: the animal may hear it and not act.
The same explanation in words

A four-step sequence: record the call in a known situation; remove everything that caused it; replay the call alone from a hidden speaker; measure what the listener does next. A note explains that step two is the experiment — a monkey running up a tree establishes nothing while the leopard is there. A second panel lists what a playback still cannot show: that the animal has a concept, that the signal is a word, or that it could refer to something absent.

A great deal of animal signalling is produced automatically by the animal’s state, not chosen — and that is one of the things that makes it unlike speech.

Well supported

Good evidence backs this, though some details remain open.

Vocal production learning — the capacity to modify vocal output on the basis of experience — is documented in a small number of lineages including cetaceans, some bats, pinnipeds, elephants, songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds. In most other groups, call structure is largely determined by developmental and physiological state rather than by learning or voluntary modulation.

Who this applies to
A generalisation about the distribution of vocal learning across animal groups, with well-characterised exceptions.
Studied in
Animalia
Why we rate it this way, and what the caveats are
Well supportedModerate confidence

The positive cases are solid. The negative cases — species asserted not to learn their calls — rest on much thinner testing, so the distribution is better described as patchily sampled than as settled.

How far it can be extended

Vocal learning has been tested in relatively few species; its apparent rarity partly reflects where people have looked.

Caveats

  • Not being learned does not make a signal simple or uninformative — alarm calls are largely innate and among the best-evidenced information-carrying signals there are.
  • Usage learning, where an animal learns when to give a call it did not learn to make, is more widespread than production learning and is often conflated with it.

Still unanswered

  • How many species classed as non-learners have actually been tested rather than assumed.

Last reviewed 2026-08-31

The evidence (2 studies)

Two different questions

How a signal travels and what it carries are separate problems, and almost every confused claim about animal communication comes from treating them as one. "Elephants communicate through the ground" is a statement about a channel. It says nothing about what is being communicated, and the honest answer to that second question is usually much narrower.

Much animal communication happens in channels people cannot perceive at all

Established

Specialists would state this without hedging. Multiple independent lines of evidence agree.

Documented signalling channels include seismic vibration transmitted through the ground, electric fields detected by mechanosensory hairs, chemical trails, and dance encoding direction and distance — none of which is available to unaided human perception.

Who this applies to
the species in which each channel has been directly demonstrated
Studied in
Loxodonta africana, Bombus terrestris, Apis mellifera, Lasius niger
Why we rate it this way, and what the caveats are
EstablishedHigh confidence

Each channel is independently well evidenced — seismic playback in elephants, electric-field detection in bumblebees, the waggle dance confirmed by radar tracking, pheromone trails by direct manipulation.

How far it can be extended

Each channel rests on its own primary study in its own species. The claim is about the range of channels in use, built only from demonstrated cases.

Caveats

  • Detecting a signal is not the same as it being used to communicate; floral electric fields are a cue produced by the flower, not a message from another bee.
  • Channel and content are different questions — knowing how a signal travels says little about what it carries.

Still unanswered

  • How many channels remain undiscovered simply because nobody has looked?

Last reviewed 2026-08-09

The evidence (4 studies)

One caution belongs with the channel list. A bumblebee detecting a flower’s electric field is sensing a *cue* — the flower is not signalling to the bee, it is simply charged. Communication requires a signal produced for its effect on a receiver, and the difference matters when counting what animals talk to each other about.

Words used here
Signal
Something an animal produces because of its effect on another animal. Distinct from a cue, which is information leaking out whether or not anyone benefits.
Referential signal
A signal that reliably designates something specific — a predator type, an individual — rather than only conveying how the sender feels.

Signals that point at things

Some animal calls point at specific things in the world, not just at how the caller feels

Well supported

Good evidence backs this, though some details remain open.

Playback experiments show that certain calls elicit predator-appropriate responses in the absence of any predator, and that some species use learned individually-distinctive labels — indicating signals that designate categories or individuals rather than only expressing arousal.

Who this applies to
the species in which referential or label-like signalling has been directly tested
Studied in
Chlorocebus pygerythrus, Tursiops truncatus, Loxodonta africana
Why we rate it this way, and what the caveats are
Well supportedHigh confidence

The vervet result has been replicated and extended across taxa for four decades, and the playback logic is unusually clean: with no predator present, the response can only come from the call.

How far it can be extended

Assembled from primary playback studies in each species. The claim concerns which kinds of signal exist, so its strength comes from the independent demonstrations rather than from any one.

Caveats

  • A signal that designates a category is not a word, and none of this is language.
  • Whether callers intend to inform anyone is not established by playback designs.
  • Referential and emotional accounts are hard to separate completely; a call can do both.

Still unanswered

  • Do any animals combine signals into structures with their own meaning?
  • How much of what looks referential is learned, and how much is developmentally fixed?

Last reviewed 2026-08-09

The evidence (3 studies)

The playback method is what makes these results trustworthy, and it is worth understanding once. Record a call. Play it back when the thing it refers to is absent. If the animals still respond appropriately, the response came from the call rather than from seeing a leopard. That single design underpins nearly everything known about referential communication.

Where these findings live

  • Elephants

    Individually specific name-like calls

  • Orca

    Pod-specific call repertoires passed down maternal lines

  • Honey bee

    Direction and distance encoded in a dance

Words used here
Playback experiment
Playing a recorded signal in the absence of what produced it, to test whether the signal alone drives the response.

What birdsong adds to this — a signal that is learned

Birdsong is where vocal learning was discovered and where almost everything known about it still comes from. Its importance here is narrow and specific: it is the clearest demonstration anywhere that an animal signal can be *acquired* rather than inherited, which is what makes signals capable of having a history, a geography and a culture.

Songbirds learn their song from other birds, during a window early in life

Established

Specialists would state this without hedging. Multiple independent lines of evidence agree.

White-crowned sparrows raised in acoustic isolation produce abnormal song retaining only broad species structure, while birds tutored during an early sensitive period reproduce the tutor dialect. Tutoring outside that window has little effect.

Who this applies to
white-crowned sparrows, with the pattern general across oscine songbirds
Studied in
Zonotrichia leucophrys, Passeriformes
Why we rate it this way, and what the caveats are
EstablishedHigh confidence

A clean isolation-and-tutoring design, replicated across species for five decades, and the foundation of the entire vocal-learning literature.

How far it can be extended

Vocal learning is established across oscine songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds. The sensitive-period experiment was done in one species; the balance of innate and learned components varies.

Caveats

  • Song and calls are different things: song is long, learned and usually seasonal; calls are short, largely innate and used year-round.
  • Most vocal-learning work covers temperate northern songbirds; female song and tropical duetting are under-studied.
  • Vocal learning is not language, and the two are routinely conflated.

Still unanswered

  • Why has vocal learning evolved in only a few bird groups?
  • How much does female song, long overlooked, change the standard account?

Last reviewed 2026-08-09

The evidence (2 studies)

One bird combines two calls in a fixed order, and the order changes what they mean

Emerging evidence

Real findings exist, but too few or too recent to be settled.

Japanese tits combine an alert note with a recruitment note in a consistent order. Playback in the natural order produced scanning followed by approach; the same notes reversed produced markedly weaker responses.

Who this applies to
wild Japanese titsDo not extend this beyond the taxa listed — the popular version over-reaches.
Studied in
Parus minor
Why we rate it this way, and what the caveats are
Emerging evidenceModerate confidence

The reversal control is strong — the same acoustic material in a different order does not work. Held at emerging because it is one species, one rule, and replication elsewhere has been difficult.

How far it can be extended

Explicitly not generalised. This is one system in one species, and attempts to demonstrate compositional effects elsewhere have had mixed results.

Caveats

  • Two elements and one ordering rule is not an open-ended grammar.
  • This is the strongest syntax candidate outside humans and remains a long way from language.
  • Wild playback offers limited control over the surrounding acoustic environment.

Still unanswered

  • Does compositional combination occur in any other species?

Last reviewed 2026-08-09

The evidence (1 study)

The Japanese tit result deserves its caution as much as its billing. Two calls combined by one ordering rule, where reversing the order weakens the response, is the strongest evidence for syntax outside humans — and it is two elements and one rule. Vocal learning and combination are the two properties birds share with language, and having two of them is not having language.

Birdsong, properly

Words used here
Song versus call
Song is long, learned, usually seasonal and usually male. Calls are short, largely innate, and used by both sexes year-round.
Sensitive period
A window early in life during which a young bird can learn a song. Outside it, the same tutoring has little effect.
Compositional syntax
Combining meaning-bearing signals so that the order changes the message. Demonstrated in one bird, with two elements.

A brain that grows a song and then lets it go

A canary’s song-control brain regions grow every spring and shrink again

Established

Specialists would state this without hedging. Multiple independent lines of evidence agree.

The forebrain nuclei controlling song production in male canaries change substantially in volume across the annual cycle, growing in the breeding season and regressing afterwards — a finding that contributed directly to the overturning of the view that adult vertebrate brains do not generate new neurons.

Who this applies to
canaries, which re-learn song each year; seasonal change is smaller in age-limited learners
Studied in
Serinus canaria
Why we rate it this way, and what the caveats are
EstablishedHigh confidence

Direct anatomical measurement, replicated widely, and followed by the demonstration of adult neurogenesis that it prompted. This is one of the better-established results in neuroscience.

How far it can be extended

Seasonal change in song nuclei has been documented in several songbird species, though its magnitude varies with whether the species re-learns song annually.

Caveats

  • Canaries are unusual; age-limited learners such as zebra finches show smaller changes.
  • Volume conflates neuron number, cell size and connectivity.
  • Captive photoperiod control exaggerates the seasonal transition.

Still unanswered

  • What is the functional benefit of regressing the circuit rather than maintaining it?
  • How far does adult neurogenesis extend in other vertebrate brains?

Last reviewed 2026-08-09

The evidence (3 studies)

A male canary’s song-control nuclei expand substantially every spring and regress afterwards. The finding mattered far beyond birdsong: the prevailing view was that adult vertebrate brains do not generate new neurons, and a brain region that doubles and halves annually is hard to reconcile with that.

The demonstration of adult neurogenesis in songbirds followed, and eventually reopened the question in mammals including ourselves. It is one of the clearest cases of a fact about an unfashionable animal overturning a general claim about brains.

The parallel to human speech is specific rather than loose — a memorised target, a critical period, a babbling phase, dependence on hearing your own voice — and it is a parallel about *acquisition*, not about meaning. Birdsong has no syntax in the linguistic sense and no compositional content.

Words used here
Neurogenesis
The generation of new neurons. Long thought impossible in adult vertebrate brains.

Why none of this is language

Human language has properties no animal system yet studied possesses: an open-ended vocabulary, combination of units into structures whose meaning depends on the arrangement, and the ability to refer to things absent in time as well as in space. Vervet alarm calls are a closed set. A dolphin signature whistle labels one individual. A waggle dance encodes two numbers.

That is not a way of diminishing them. A bee conveying a precise vector in the dark on a vertical comb is doing something no human can do unaided. The point is that "animal language" imports expectations the evidence cannot meet, and the resulting disappointment is unearned — the actual findings are stranger and better than the headline version.

  • Does any animal combine signals into structures with their own meaning?

    Why it matters: Combination is the property that separates a vocabulary from a language. Suggestive results exist in birds and primates and none is settled.

    What would settle it: Demonstrating that a combined signal means something neither component means alone, with the components independently controlled.

  • Do signalling animals intend to inform anyone?

    Why it matters: A call that reliably produces a useful response need not be produced *in order to* produce it. Almost every popular account assumes intent that no design has tested.

    What would settle it: Evidence that signalling varies with what the sender believes the receiver knows, rather than with the receiver’s mere presence.

  • How much are we missing for lack of the right instruments?

    Why it matters: Seismic elephant communication and bee electroreception were both invisible until someone measured the right channel.

    What would settle it: Systematic surveys of under-instrumented channels across taxa.

The research behind this page

46 studies, newest first. Each one has a page explaining what it found and what it could not show.

2024Nature Ecology & Evolution

African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls

The model identified intended receivers better than chance, and elephants responded more strongly and more quickly to calls originally addressed to them.

2024Nature Communications

Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations

Coda structure varies systematically along dimensions the authors name rubato — smooth variation in overall duration — and ornamentation, an extra click added at the end of a coda.

2023Science

Social signal learning of the waggle dance in honey bees

Bees with no opportunity to follow experienced dancers still danced, but with persistently larger directional errors and disordered encoding of distance.

2021Biology Letters

Adaptation of sperm whales to open-boat whalers: rapid social learning on a large scale?

Strike rate fell by roughly 60% within a few years of whaling beginning in the region.

2019Science

Evolution of vocal learning and spoken language

Vocal production learning is documented in a small number of distantly related lineages, and the independently evolved brain circuits supporting it share a recurring feature: a direct projection from forebrain to the motor neurons controlling the vocal organ, which is absent in non-learners.

2016Nature Communications

Experimental evidence for compositional syntax in bird calls

Birds scanned and then approached when the notes were played in the natural order, but responded far less when the same notes were reversed.

2016Scientific Reports

Everyday bat vocalizations contain information about emitter, addressee, context, and behavior

Classifiers recovered caller identity well above chance, and could identify the addressee and the behavioural context — food, mating, sleeping position, perch — from the call alone.

2016Science

Reciprocal signaling in honeyguide-human mutualism

The specialised call more than doubled the probability of being guided compared with control sounds, and increased the probability of the trip ending at a bees’ nest.

2013Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Bottlenose dolphins can use learned vocal labels to address each other

Dolphins responded to their own synthetic signature whistle by calling back, and did not respond in the same way to the whistles of others.

2013Science

Detection and learning of floral electric fields by bumblebees

Bumblebees learned to discriminate flowers by their electric field alone, and combined that information with colour to improve accuracy.

2013Journal of Comparative Physiology A

Communication in bottlenose dolphins: 50 years of signature whistle research

Signature whistles are learned in the first months of life, are stable for decades, are individually distinctive in contour rather than in voice, and are copied by close associates — most often between mothers and calves and between allied males.

2013Biology Letters

Open-ended song learning in a hummingbird

Adult birds changed their songs after their first year, and the changes tracked shifts in the local shared song type rather than being idiosyncratic drift.

2012Biological Journal of the Linnean Society

Cultural traditions and the evolution of reproductive isolation: ecological speciation in killer whales?

Ecotypes that overlap in range do not interbreed and differ genetically, and the differences track learned behaviour rather than geography.

2012Proceedings of the Royal Society B

Vertical transmission of learned signatures in a wild parrot

Each chick developed an individually distinctive contact call whose features resembled those of the parents that raised it rather than its genetic parents, and parents used distinct calls when addressing different chicks before the chicks called at all.

2010Journal of Mammalogy

Spatial structure of Amur (Siberian) tigers (Panthera tigris altaica) on Sikhote-Alin Biosphere Zapovednik, Russia

The same land-tenure structure appears in a habitat with a fraction of the prey density, but at a completely different scale: female ranges are an order of magnitude larger than in Chitwan, and male ranges larger still.

2010Current Biology

A Negative Feedback Signal That Is Triggered by Peril Curbs Honey Bee Recruitment

Bees that met danger at a food source returned and delivered stop signals to nestmates dancing for that source.

2008Cambridge University Press

Bird Song: Biological Themes and Variations

Song serves two principal functions — repelling rivals and attracting mates — supported by playback and removal experiments.

2008Animal Behaviour

Vocal mimicry in songbirds

Mimicry is taxonomically widespread and functionally unexplained in most species that do it.

2008Animal Cognition

Prairie dog alarm calls encode labels about predator colors

Calls differed consistently with the colour of the walker’s shirt, as well as with the size and shape of the intruder.

2007Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Nuthatches eavesdrop on variations in heterospecific chickadee mobbing alarm calls

Nuthatches adjusted their mobbing response to match the threat level encoded in the chickadee calls, responding more strongly to calls that chickadees produce for more dangerous predators.

2006Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

Wild elephant (Loxodonta africana) breeding herds respond to artificially transmitted seismic stimuli

Herds responded to the seismic-only stimulus with alerting and defensive bunching.

2006Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Signature whistle shape conveys identity information to bottlenose dolphins

Dolphins responded significantly more often to the synthetic version of a close relative’s signature whistle than to control contours, despite the synthetic sounds carrying none of the vocal characteristics that would identify the individual producing them.

2006Animal Cognition

Grey parrot numerical competence: a review

The parrot labelled quantities up to six accurately, answered questions requiring a specific subset to be counted rather than the whole set, and showed some understanding of ordinality and of the absence of a quantity.

2005Nature

The flight paths of honeybees recruited by the waggle dance

Recruits flew the vector encoded in the dance — the right direction, for roughly the right distance — and then searched.

2005Nature

Elephants are capable of vocal learning

Both elephants produced sounds outside the normal species repertoire that closely matched sounds in their acoustic environment, demonstrating vocal production learning.

2005Science

Allometry of Alarm Calls: Black-Capped Chickadees Encode Information About Predator Size

Smaller, more manoeuvrable raptors — the ones that actually threaten a chickadee — produced calls with more "dee" notes.

2003Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Vocal clans in sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus)

Repertoires cluster into a small number of distinct types — clans — that do not correspond to geography.

2002Nature

What songbirds teach us about learning

Song learning proceeds through a critical period, requires hearing both the tutor and the bird’s own voice, and depends on a dedicated forebrain circuit that supports variable practice separately from stable performance.

2001Marine Mammal Science

Killer whale predation on sperm whales: observations and implications

Killer whales attacked in coordinated groups, and sperm whales responded with a defensive rosette — heads inward, tails outward — that appeared effective.

2000Animal Behaviour

Dialect change in resident killer whales: implications for vocal learning and cultural transmission

Call structure changed gradually over the period, and the changes were shared within a matriline rather than occurring independently in individuals.

1999The Birds of North America

Common Raven (Corvus corax)

Ravens pair for life on a defended territory, build large stick nests reused across years, lay three to seven eggs, and fledge young that stay with the parents for weeks before joining non-breeding flocks.

1999Nature

Signals of need in parent–offspring communication and their exploitation by the common cuckoo

A single cuckoo chick received provisioning comparable to a whole host brood.

1991Canadian Journal of Zoology

Vocal traditions among resident killer whales (Orcinus orca) in coastal waters of British Columbia

Each pod used a stable, distinctive set of discrete calls.

1990Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

Signature whistles of free-ranging bottlenose dolphins Tursiops truncatus: stability and mother-offspring comparisons

Signature whistle contours remain stable over at least a decade.

1989Naturwissenschaften

Self-organized shortcuts in the Argentine ant

Ants converged almost entirely on the shorter branch within minutes, because ants taking it returned sooner and reinforced its pheromone trail faster.

1989Animal Behaviour

Scent marking in free-ranging tigers, Panthera tigris

Tigers mark heavily and non-randomly.

1988Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

The social contexts of some very low frequency calls of African elephants

Elephants produce a repertoire of infrasonic calls associated with distinct situations, including contact between separated groups, oestrus, and the state that males enter when in musth.

1986Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology

Infrasonic calls of the Asian elephant

Elephants produce powerful calls with fundamental frequencies below about 20 hertz, at the edge of or below human hearing, and these calls accompany social behaviour that had appeared silent.

1984Cognition

Comprehension of sentences by bottlenosed dolphins

Both dolphins responded correctly to novel sentences, including reversible ones where the same words in a different order specify a different action, indicating sensitivity to syntactic structure rather than to word lists.

1981Science

A brain for all seasons: cyclical anatomical changes in song control nuclei of the canary brain

Song control nuclei grew substantially in spring and shrank afterwards, changing volume by a large fraction across the annual cycle in an adult brain.

1981Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology

The social organization of tigers (Panthera tigris) in Royal Chitawan National Park, Nepal

Tigers hold individual ranges rather than moving at random, and the ranges are structured: a resident female occupies an exclusive area, a resident male’s much larger range overlaps those of several females, and neighbours avoid each other in time rather than by never sharing ground.

1980Science

Monkey responses to three different alarm calls: evidence of predator classification and semantic communication

Each call produced the escape response appropriate to its predator: monkeys ran into trees for the leopard call, looked up and took cover for the eagle call, and looked down at the ground for the snake call — with no predator present.

1979Science

Can an ape create a sentence?

The great majority of the chimpanzee's signs were prompted: they reproduced signs a teacher had made moments earlier, or were produced while the teacher was signing.

1977The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Sperm whale codas

Sperm whales produce stereotyped, patterned sequences of clicks — named codas — distinct from the regular clicking used for echolocation.

1970Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology

A comparative approach to vocal learning: song development in white-crowned sparrows

Birds tutored during a sensitive period early in life reproduced that dialect as adults.

1941Journal of Experimental Zoology

The sensory basis of obstacle avoidance by flying bats

Blinded bats avoided the wires as well as sighted ones.

This page is a stop on a longer route

A guided journey reads several subjects in a deliberate order, with an argument for why one follows another. You can join in the middle.

Where to go from here

Each of these follows from something on this page — a relationship in the evidence, a claim people ask about, or the next mechanism along.

How complete this page is, and what it is still missing

NatureHQ publishes its own gaps. This page is at 85% completeness against what we would call a finished subject, and was last reviewed on 2026-08-09. It carries 27 claims and answers 13 mapped search questions.

  • 5 high-priority search intent(s) not yet covered
  • no popular claim about this subject has been checked yet
  • Birdsong — the largest and best-studied communication literature of all — is entirely absent.
  • Signal combination and syntax-like structure are discussed as open questions without primary research attached.
  • Chemical communication is represented only by ant trail pheromones.