Calibrating the data logger…
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.
Knowledge graph centered on Evolving communicative complexity: insights from r with 47 nodes and 205 connections. Top connected: Social network analysis of animal behaviour: a pro, Marmota, Yellow-bellied Marmot, Callospermophilus lateralis, Does sociality drive the evolution of communicativ.
Items connected by shared entities, co-authorship, citations, or semantic similarity.
9 in Knowledge Commons, 71 external