Abstract ways creatures communicate

[VirusType2]

Do any of you know interesting ways creatures communicate?


Argentine Ants, communicate with smell :

http://www.insecta-inspecta.com/ants/argentine/index.html

To feed and be fed, two ants stand up with their mouths pressed together, and the liquid comes out of one ant's crop and into the other ant's mouth. Secretions called pheromones come with the food. The pheromones are in a form that can be smelled. Because each nest has its own distinct smell, ants can recognize each other with pheromones. The pheromones communicate what jobs need to be done, excitement, or danger. Pheromones also act to attract mates, sound alarms, and provide food trails from the nest among other purposes. Secretions can create a bond or friendship between colony members, helping them to work together.

Ants also communicate through short distance sound:

It is well known that ants do not respond to sound on a human scale. You can shout at an ant and it doesn't seem to notice. Yet many ant species communicate by means of squeaking sounds from astridulatory organ on the ant's body, consisting of a washboard-like set of ridges and a scraper. The squeaking sounds are usually very faint but they pervade ant colonies. The amplified sound of a colony of black fire ants (Solenopsis richteri), disturbed by a microphone probe pushed into their mound, is given in the attached recording. The sounds can also be heard on the web at www.olemiss.edu/'hickling/. Sounds from individual ants can be heard distinctly and there are a number of different signals. The sounds are in the audible frequency range around lkHz. Because ants appear to be deaf to airborne sound on a human scale, myrmecologists have inferred that they transmit stridulation signals through the soil, or other solid substrate. However, for a number of reasons, this mode of transmission is highly unlikely. A more likely explanation is that ants communicate with each other through the air using nearfield sound. The nearfield is an acoustic transition zone surrounding a small source, the size of an ant, in which the characteristics of the sound change abruptly before it can propagate fully in the farfield. Usually an ant is a few millimeters in size and the surrounding nearfield is roughly 200 mm in diameter, which is large enough to contain a number of ants. As with other insects, ants are believed to “hear” airborne sound with their antennae, using hair-like sensors at the tips. By sensing the relative difference in sound displacement between the tips of the antennae, an ant can detect a stridulation signal in the nearfield, where displacement changes rapidly with distance, but can not detect sound in the farfield, where displacement changes more gradually. This explains how ants can detect sound from other ants while, at the same time, being unaware of sound on a human scale. This is fortunate for ants because they would otherwise be overwhelmed by background noise, both natural and man-made. As an added bonus, sensing relative displacement between the tips of the antennae provides a means of determining the distance to a sound source, as well as its direction. With human hearing it is possible to determine the direction but not the distance to a source, because the source strength is not known. Humans generally locate a sound source using a combination of hearing and vision. For ants, the relative difference in displacement is independent of source strength and can be used to determine distance directly. Since ants appear to be almost blind, the ability to locate a source purely by means of sound would obviously be useful.

The nearfield is an acoustic effect that exists independently of ants. Since it is ideally suited to their needs, it would be surprising if they did not use it. In fact it would seem that the stridulatory organ and acoustic receptors of ants have evolved by adapting to the nearfield. Combined with chemical communication using pheromones, acoustic communication plays an important role in ant societies. A more complete knowledge of the nearfield and how ants use it will aid greatly in understanding the role of acoustic communication. (http://entweb.clemson.edu/fireant/99conf/fa3.htm).

Do any of you know of other interesting ways creatures communicate?

Crickets, birds, wales, dolphins, dogs, cats, ferrets, mice - pick anything on Earth and find out how it communicates, or just use your knowlege and post it here and I will look it up for you.

Where I live, there are many birds. Sometimes it seems to me so obvious that these birds are communicating. For the most part it seems like chirping, and that might be so. But occassionally, there will be one very loud bird and it seems like it is speaking to a large area of birds, and it is chirping repeatedly in a different manner for about an hour. Almost like Morse code, but with chirps instead of a flashing light. While I know very little about birds, and nobody has ever said to me that they have a bird language, well.. I don't know, they have a bird brain. I might have to look this up.


What I was really getting at, is how some creatures on Earth might communicate through radio waves or some other strange means.

 

[xcellerate]

bees dance.

"The angle from the sun indicates direction. The duration of the waggle part of the dance signifies the distance. Approximately 1 second of dance = 1 km distance."

 

[<RJMC>]

theres a posibility that octopus comunicate whit theyr quick colors changes

 

[Raziaar]

Elephants communicate with their feet using mini earthquakes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/features/302feature1.shtml

Co-ordinating group behaviour
It became apparent from the camera footage that elephants gather in various groups of different sizes at different times. Sometimes they were in an intimate family group, other times they would have joined some other families to make a bond group. In the wet season, elephants are said to super-herd in very big groups. For a long time it was a mystery as to how these groups co-ordinated themselves.

The footage from the cameras backs up the theory that elephants communicate through seismic-evoking sounds that transmit through the ground, like mini earthquakes. These sounds carry long distances and allow the elephants to assess where they are positioned in relation to one another, enabling them to co-ordinate group movement and alert others to their sexual and emotional state.

Cameraman Michael Richards had a unique view of the elephants. "At times, their behaviour appeared quite bizarre - they could freeze for up to a minute at a time, and presumably they were listening to sounds we could not detect. I couldn't be sure if they were hearing sounds from the camera or from a long way away."

Listening with feet
The feet of elephants are more than mere clumping cylinders; their interiors are filled with vibration sensors known as Pacinian corpuscles, which have a structure similar to an onion, with a slimy gel between each layer. Vibrations ripple through the layers and send a nerve signal to the brain. It is also believed that they may sense vibrations through the toenails, which carry to the ear via bone-conduction. The cameras also showed the elephants standing with their trunks to the ground, as though they were listening, which is probably what they were doing, given that the trunk is also packed with vibration sensors.

According to geophysicists, details sent in a seismic wave become diluted after travelling a long distance, but elephants have been found to possess a mass of brain cortex that allows for an increased processing power of weak signals. So, along with chemical signals and higher range trumpeting and shrieks, elephants have an extensive range of communication.

A pachyderm language?
Many philosophers argue that language is necessary for high-conscious states and complex thought processes, but without understanding elephant signals that are out of our hearing range it is difficult to know how complex it is. Do elephants think in a language? And if so, can they recall complex linguistic thoughts? These are questions that have not been satisfactorily answered for any animal other than us.

 

[The Monkey]

Spicy Tunas communicate through poor grammar and spelling, at the same time that they try to get people do understand that they're not anti-semites, they just hate jews.

Sorry, just had to

 

[Ren.182]

Elephants communicate with their feet using mini earthquakes.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/animals/features/302feature1.shtml

Wow, I didn't know that. That's pretty cool. Elephants are amazing beautiful creatures. Thanks for that

 

[evil^milk]

anyone have that ant colony sound recording described in the first post?

 

[Beerdude26]

bees dance.

"The angle from the sun indicates direction. The duration of the waggle part of the dance signifies the distance. Approximately 1 second of dance = 1 km distance."

I've had to learn this in school last year and boy was it boring (but interesting at the same time )

 

[Jangle]

I've had to learn this in school last year and boy was it boring (but interesting at the same time )

Boring and interesting??

*brain explodes* *no, implodes. yeah, that's much cooler.*