Signal production

The challenge faced by a sender is the creation of a controlled perturbation of the environment that can be detected and recognized by a receiver. Sound production is one mechanism. Sound travels in waves, and thus any sound can be characterized by its component frequencies and the physical size of each wave component (called the wavelength). The wavelength of a sound depends upon its frequency and the speed of sound in the propagating medium. The speed of sound is greatest in solids, intermediate in water, and least in air. Thus, a given frequency of sound in water has a wavelength 4.5 times longer than the same frequency in air, and the same frequency in a solid can be up to 15 times longer than that in air. This is important to animals using sound communication because it is physically difficult for an animal to produce a loud sound with a wavelength much larger than itself. For this reason, small animals tend to communicate with high-frequency sounds, and only large animals use low-frequency sound signals. Aquatic animals require higher-frequency signals than do similarly sized terrestrial animals.

The lowest frequencies that small insects, frogs, and birds can produce as signals may be many thousands of waves per second. Animal muscles cannot twitch this quickly, which makes sound production challenging. One solution is to use frequency multiplication. For example, hard-bodied animals drag a comblike structure over a sharp edge. A single muscle contraction causes the sharp edge to hit successive teeth in the comb, thereby producing a sequence of sound waves. This is called stridulation. Arthropods all have hard exoskeletons, and by mounting the comb on one external body part and the sharp edge on the other, they can stridulate by rubbing the two hard parts together. For example, lobsters rub an antenna against the head, beetles rub a leg against the body, and crickets and katydids rub one wing over another. There are other techniques for frequency multiplication. Terrestrial vertebrates use muscles to force air into and out of their lungs while breathing. If thin membranes are inserted into this airflow, the membranes will flutter, producing sound waves at much higher frequencies than the airflow cycle. This is how frogs croak, lions roar, and birds sing.

To be able to use different sound signals in different contexts, animals must have some way to control and vary the sounds that they produce. Varying the rhythm of insect stridulation or bird breathing is one way to produce different signals. Air-breathing vertebrates can also change the tension on the vibrating membranes to produce quite complicated frequency modulations. A third mechanism is to produce sounds that initially contain many different frequencies and then selectively filter out some frequencies and amplify others. Animals such as katydids, frogs, bats, and howler monkeys have special resonating structures attached to their sound-producing organs that select the radiated frequencies and couple the sounds to the medium.

Light is another modality used for producing signals. Most visual signals rely on the presence of ambient light that is generated by the Sun. Similar to sound, light propagates as waves. When white light—which contains many different light frequencies—strikes an object, some of it is reflected, and it is this reflected light that creates a visual image of the object. If the object absorbs some frequencies of white light and reflects others, the receiver will see the object as coloured. When red light frequencies are absorbed, the object appears green or blue. When the green light frequencies are absorbed, the colour appears purple. Different animal groups tend to have different ranges of light frequencies that they can see. Birds, lizards, and some insects can see light frequencies well into the short-waved ultraviolet. Humans cannot see these short waves. Thus, in humans, objects that appear to be similar or uncoloured may be seen as different or highly coloured by a bird or a honeybee.

The challenge for a sender is to produce a visible image that is detectable against the background by a receiver. One way to do this is to move the signal body part in front of a static background or to move it in a different direction relative to a moving background. This simply requires normal muscle movements—no additional structure is needed. However, many senders enlarge or decorate the moved body part to increase the chances that the receiver will notice the signal. The sender may also select a site in which to produce the signal that has a simpler background or that is moving in a very different way.

Another major way to catch a receiver’s visual attention is by increasing the contrast between a signal body part and the background. Black-and-white patterns are a common solution. The black is generated by using one of several synthesizable proteins called melanins. White is created by inserting small crystals or bubbles into the organ surface. They are large enough that they scatter all light wavelengths, creating white stimuli. Colours other than black and white are more difficult to produce. Although animals cannot synthesize carotenoid pigments, they can sequester the pigments by eating certain plant parts or by eating other animals that ingest those plants. Carotenoids are relatively stable compounds, generating colours in the yellow-to-red range. There are few natural pigments that are blue or green that animals can utilize for coloration. One exception is the chemical combination of carotenoids and proteins used by arthropods to colour their carapaces (hard outer coverings) dark green or blue. Crabs and lobsters turn red when cooked because the pigment proteins are denatured with heat, releasing the carotenoids. Other animal groups use nonpigment techniques to produce blue or green coloration. One method uses a checkerboard matrix of alternating more-dense and less-dense materials in an external surface layer to selectively scatter certain wavelengths. The colour reflected depends on the size and spacing of the matrix. This mechanism is responsible for producing the blue and green feathers of jays and parrots, the blue skin on the heads of turkeys and male mandrills, and blue eyes in humans and snow leopards. Another technique is to use two thin layers of reflecting material on external surfaces. If the layers have the correct thickness, certain wavelengths are reflected by the two layers out of phase (the crest of one wave coincides with the valley of a second wave), thereby canceling each other out. The remaining light waves are in phase (the crests of the light waves coincide) and are visible as intense colours. Which light waves are canceled depends on the viewing angle of the receiver. Thus, the apparent colour can change as the sender shifts its position relative to the receiver. These are the iridescent colours seen in many hummingbirds and butterflies.

While it is often assumed that ambient light is white, every local environment is actually bathed in its own particular mixture of light frequencies. On a forest floor there may be only small amounts of red and blue light in the ambient mixture because green-reflecting plants absorb both red and blue light strongly. Fine particles in the atmosphere and the dense molecules in water both scatter the shorter blue and ultraviolet light frequencies but transmit the longer red and orange frequencies. The mixture of ambient-light frequencies can be a strong selective force favouring certain colours for signals. Where there is little ambient light, an animal may have to produce its own light (bioluminescence). This ability has evolved in fireflies, ostracod crustaceans (mussel shrimps), deep-sea squid, and marine fish, all of which produce their own light chemically or harbor luminescent symbionts that can produce light for them.

A third major modality used by most animals (with the exception of many birds) is olfactory signaling. Senders deposit or release chemicals called pheromones that receivers later detect by smell or taste. The cost to senders of chemical communication can be minimal, as when feces or urine is used as a signal, or can be substantial, as when complex organic molecules must be synthesized solely for the purpose. Ants are prolific users of chemical communication. Their small bodies contain up to a dozen separate glands, each producing a different chemical compound or mixture of compounds that serves a different social function. Ants use chemical signals to mark their foraging trails, to recruit group members for defense against invaders, to attract mates, to regulate development of different worker castes, to solicit food, and to distinguish colony members from nonmembers. Many mammalian species employ chemical communication for important social functions, such as mate attraction, synchronization of mating, and territory defense. Mammalian glands often produce specialized chemical products, but some species mix various natural body products into a pouch and let bacteria do the work of producing the final pheromone product.

The potential for signal diversity is extremely high in chemical communication, as is the opportunity to create a signal that is very different from background odours. However, this diversity is often constrained by the degree to which chemical signals are appropriately volatile in air or soluble in water, resistant to degradation after release, and detectable by receivers. Animals often limit the volatility or solubility of pheromones by embedding them in an inert carrier compound that releases odorant slowly. This technique is particularly useful for territorial defense. Desert iguanas carry this one step farther by using a carrier that does not release odorant until another lizard flicks the carrier with its wet tongue. The small packets of deposited pheromone absorb ultraviolet light and thus appear as black specks to animals that can see in the ultraviolet spectrum, such as iguanas. Iguanas approach the specks and taste them, thereby releasing the pheromones. Other animals accelerate the dispersal of relatively nonvolatile scents by spreading them over a tuft of fine hairs, actively spraying them into a medium (e.g., air or water), or releasing them into strongly flowing wind or water currents.

Tactile signals involve special patterns of touching, generating persistent eddies in a medium, or the transmission of vibrations through a substrate. Touching during aggressive encounters may provide information about the body size and strength of opponents. The grooming of another individual, called allopreening or allogrooming, has both hygienic and signal functions in many birds and mammals. Courtship signals may include a tactile component for synchronizing mating or gamete release. Roosting with body contact not only preserves heat but also appears to signal pair or group affiliations in mammals and birds. Arthropods make wide use of tactile, eddy, and substrate signals. For example, aquatic male copepods can identify the distinct eddies left by swimming females and track them for mating. The dances of honeybees are usually performed in a dark hive, and attending workers monitor the dancer with their antennae; some signal vibrations may also pass through the honeycomb substrate. Other arthropods attending to substrate-borne vibrations include water striders (using the surface of water), spiders (using their webs), and leafhoppers (using their host-plant stems and leaves).

Electrical discharges can also be used for signals. Two orders of freshwater fish, the Mormyriformes of Africa and the Gymnotiformes of the neotropics, are nocturnal or live in muddy water. These fish create an electric field and use distortions induced by nearby objects to navigate and find food. Not surprisingly, they also use the same electrical discharges to communicate with each other. In both groups, special bioelectric organs have evolved to produce rapid trains of discharges. The waveforms of these discharges vary with species and even with sex, and the rates of discharge can be modulated in complex ways to mediate social interactions. Because of the high resistance of fresh water and the low voltages the fish produce, electrical communication is limited to a distance of about 1 metre (3.3 feet).