Evolving communicative complexity: insights from rodents and beyond

Social living goes hand in hand with communication, but the details of this relationship are rarely simple. Complex communication may be described by attributes as diverse as a species' entire repertoire, signallers' individualistic signatures, or complex acoustic phenomena within single c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences 2012-07, Vol.367 (1597), p.1869-1878
Main Authors: Pollard, Kimberly A., Blumstein, Daniel T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acoustics
Alarm Call
Animal social behavior
Animals
Biological Evolution
Demography
Evolution
Group size
Individuality
Information Theory
Models, Biological
Primates
Repertoire Size
Review
Rodents
Sciuridae - physiology
Sciuridae - psychology
Social Behavior
Social communication
Social Environment
Social groups
Sociality
Species Specificity
Squirrels
Vocal Complexity
Vocalization, Animal - physiology
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Summary:Social living goes hand in hand with communication, but the details of this relationship are rarely simple. Complex communication may be described by attributes as diverse as a species' entire repertoire, signallers' individualistic signatures, or complex acoustic phenomena within single calls. Similarly, attributes of social complexity are diverse and may include group size, social role diversity, or networks of interactions and relationships. How these different attributes of social and communicative complexity co-evolve is an active question in behavioural ecology. Sciurid rodents (ground squirrels, prairie dogs and marmots) provide an excellent model system for studying these questions. Sciurid studies have found that demographic role complexity predicts alarm call repertoire size, while social group size predicts alarm call individuality. Along with other taxa, sciurids reveal an important insight: different attributes of sociality are linked to different attributes of communication. By breaking social and communicative complexity down to different attributes, focused studies can better untangle the underlying evolutionary relationships and move us closer to a comprehensive theory of how sociality and communication evolve.
ISSN:0962-8436
1471-2970
DOI:10.1098/rstb.2011.0221