14 DAY TRIAL // While crickets, orangutans and whales indeed communicate differently, there is a common denominator between them, researchers say. A bird's chirp, a whale's clicks, and a primate's scream can be construed as different, but a new cross-species study has revealed that mathematical models can predict the elements that all these natural, instinctive calls have in common. The investigation has been conducted on hundreds of species of animals, ranging from insects, birds, and fish to frogs, lizards and mammals.
“Very few people have compared cricket chirps to codfish sounds to the sounds made by whales and monkeys to see if there were commonalities in the key features of acoustic signals, including the frequency, power and duration of signals,” University of Florida (UF) College of Liberal Arts and Sciences expert James Gillooly, PhD, explains. He is an assistant professor in the university's department of biology, and also a member of the UF Genetics Institute, ScienceDaily reports.
“Our results indicate that, for all species, basic features of acoustic communication are primarily controlled by individual metabolism, which in turn varies predictably with body size and temperature. So, when the calls are adjusted for an animal's size and temperature, they even sound alike,” he adds. The research team, which also featured investigators from the Oklahoma State University (OSU), basically found that each organism's intake and use of energy from the environment dictated how they would try to communicate with each other.
OSU Assistant Professor of Zoology Alexander G. Ophir, PhD, who has also been part of the group, believes that the new efforts are the first true initiatives in the field of creating a general theoretical framework for acoustic communication. Now, all the differences that exist between the various sounds made by the species of the planet can be referenced to this “mathematical baseline” that the science team created. Further details of the work were published in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
“These findings say if you give me information about an animal of a certain body size and the mechanisms it uses to make sounds, I can give you a rough idea of what it sounds like. It allows us to imagine where the evolution of acoustic signals might go, and where it might have come from. Further study will probably put these principles in a more explicit evolutionary framework, but this is an interesting idea and presented with such a broad view,” University of Massachusetts Amherst Associate Professor of Biology Jeffery Podos, PhD, concludes. He has not been part of the research.