-Camelia Bhattacharyya, Amity University Kolkata
Fay Weldon once said, “Sound waves do not die out. They travel forever and forever. All our sentences are immortal. Our useless bleatings circle the universe for all eternity”. Nature too has its own sound which is exclusive for each kind of species and is the unique kind of communication which the species have learnt over the years and have passed on from one generation to the other. A recent study on the drumming patterns of 92 woodpecker species have shown huge changes in the parameters of sound from one species to the other, thus depicting that the varieties can be easily distinguished through the characterization of the sounds they make.
These sounds of different frequencies and wavelengths are used in various ways to transfer the mutual information (MI) like, “steady slow”, “steady fast”, “acceleration”, “irregular sequences”, “regular sequences” and “double knock” and are done in diverse ways by the birds due to the huge range of species diversity. Not only that, but these patterns of MI have evolved and being modified from one generation to the other and are still undergoing such changes. Both MI and the classification index (CI) were calculated from the discriminant function analysis (DFA) data. While the MI showed a short range of variation of the ways of communicating the different factors, the CI showed a bigger range in which the species were different yet a lot similar to each other in terms of communication, thus concluding that the CI is a better way of finding out the different communication patterns of the organisms. More research is required to find such patterns in the other subdivisions of the great kingdom Animalia.
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Source: Garcia, M., Theunissen, F., Sèbe, F. et al. Evolution of communication signals and information during species radiation. Nat Commun 11, 4970 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-18772-3
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