© 2001 by The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
Vibration as a Communication Channel: A Synopsis1
1 Faculty of Biological Sciences, The University of Tulsa, Oklahoma 74104
The sensitivity of animals to low-frequency vibrations (Hadley and Williams, 1968
; Dorward and McIntyre, 1971; Hartline, 1971; Salmon and Horch, 1972) and their ability to produce vibrations in the substrate (Pearman, 1928; Emerson and Simpson, 1929; Haskell, 1955; Sismondo, 1980; Uetz and Stratton, 1982) have been recognized for some time. Yet, the analyses required to determine the biological usefulness of an ability to produce or detect vibration are still rare (Ewing, 1989). Merely being species-specific and stereotypical does not make an event a signal (Doherty and Gerhardt, 1984; Bradbury and Vehrencamp, 1998). Activities of animals set up airborne sound and substrate-borne vibration simultaneously (Gogala, 1985), but whether or not these are true signals depends on the environment and adaptations of animals to communication in that environment (Keuper et al., 1985).
Logical arguments once suggested that physical limitations on communication via the substrate were severe (Schwartzkopff, 1974). In fact, when Brownell first described detection of Rayleigh waves by foraging sand scorpions in 1977, he expressed the conventional wisdom: "Natural solids are not considered important avenues of information transfer, since they are generally heterogeneous and inelastic, or the conduction velocity and wavelength of the signals they conduct are too large to convey biologically useful information other than to warn of a disturbing force nearby" (Brownell, 1977, p. 479). Yet, when he continued to question, he found that the nocturnal scorpion, Paruroctonus mesaensis, can interpret vibrations in sand to determine both direction and distance of prey species and that conduction velocities are actually much lower than had been assumed (Brownell, 1977, 1984). The scorpion does rather better in extracting information from vibrations in sand than preying-mantids and jumping spiders on land and water striders on the water surface (Brownell and Farley, 1979b). More recent investigations by Cocroft et al. (2000) have suggested that a vibration localization mechanism can function at even the smallest spatial scales in arthropods. Thus, as in most things, the more we search, the more we find. Animals, after all, in the world according to Barth, "...look at the world through windows that may differ drastically from our own" (1998, p. 228).
In the past 30 yr, computers and hardware such as the geophone, used to listen for footfalls in the jungles of Vietnam, have allowed researchers to answer increasingly sophisticated questions about how animals send and receive signals, and we know that vibration signals in the substrate are sent in a variety of contexts and across animal taxa. These signals were characterized as boundary vibrations in an excellent review by Markl (1983). Bending waves likely carry the most biologically useful information in plant stems (Gogala, 1985) and allow for communication over distances of some meters (Michelsen et al., 1982). In the complex environments of wood and soil substrates, it is probable that more than one type of boundary wave, especially longitudinal and Rayleigh waves, is important (Brownell, 1977; Brownell and Farley, 1979a; Gogala, 1985). In this symposium, our only restriction is with regard to the medium through which the vibrations are sent. Thus, while soil and plant stem vibrations tell us only part of the story, studies of vibrations in water, or wing vibrations in air, or comb vibrations of honeybees must be left to another telling.
We will learn about large animals and small that use vibration in communication, often in a primary role. Caitlin O'Connell will tell how elephants rumble and stomp to produce vibrations that can travel tens of kilometers. Jan Randall will report on her work with fossorial and semi-fossorial desert rodents of several lineages that footdrum in multiple contexts. Rex Cocroft will review the roles of vibrational communication in group-living insects, including parental care and sibling communication. Philip Brownell will tell us about his more than twenty-year study of how sand scorpions detect location and distance of prey, including a theoretical model he has developed to describe the mechanism these scorpions use to map vibration source locations. Ted Lewis will describe specialized features of the frog's ear and how these are used to perceive vibration. John Shadley will report on our field work to discover the role of vibration communication in prairie mole crickets. Peter Narins will tell us about use of seismic signals in subterranean mammals and how these are detected. Randy Hunt will tell us of the role of sexual selection in leafhoppers based on their vibration-based communication.
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1 From the Symposium Vibration as a Communication Channel presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, 3–7 January 2001, at Chicago, Illinois.
2 E-mail: peggy-hill{at}utulsa.edu
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