Journal
PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY B-BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES
Volume 367, Issue 1597, Pages 1869-1878Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2011.0221
Keywords
sociality; individuality; repertoire size; alarm call; information theory; vocal complexity
Categories
Funding
- American Philosophical Society
- American Society of Mammalogists
- Animal Behavior Society
- Explorers Club
- Mildred Mathias/UC Reserves
- National Geographic Society
- National Institute of Health
- National Science Foundation
- Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory
- Sigma Xi
- UCLA
- UC Davis
- University of Kansas
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available