For us humans, language is the most important communication tool.
Every day with one mouth rattling, I see who else doesn't understand me (bushi).
So do you!
But have you ever wondered how human language belongs to humans, and animals don't speak?
In fact, our human language can be regarded as an "enhanced and upgraded version" of animal sounds, and animals not only use sounds to communicate, but also expressions, glows, chemicals, touch and even electrical signals are also their "language".
Emoticon signals
Its "laughter" does not have to be laughter
Many mammals can make rich facial expressions as a second language in addition to calls.
In recent years, studies have shown that there are 27 kinds of basic facial expressions of humans, 13 kinds of chimpanzees, 16 kinds of dogs, and there are 17 kinds of horses that always pull a big face!
Horses are happy like humans, grinning at their kind and showing a "smile"
However, the "very human-like" expression on the animal's face may not have the same meaning as the human expression.
Dogs, for example, have a slightly open mouth and a "smile" with the corners of their mouths upturned, which is often an expression of tension, anxiety or pain; while when the dog is happy, it usually grins and shows its fangs, which is quite scary if you don't look closely (it is more frightening to look closely).
Like someone is queuing me?
Fireflies without a "face" use light to convey signals.
Fireflies have light emitters at the end of their abdomen, they can manipulate the light and dark changes of the light emitters, and use the light emitters to communicate with the same kind, just like morse code, the average person does not want to understand.
There is a firefly in North America, and the males will fly low during courtship, flashing a yellow shimmer every 5.8 seconds. If the female wants to respond, she will emit light after the male emits light for 1 to 2 seconds, and the time control is quite precise. The male worm found that the female worm responded, and what was going to happen next did not need me to expand on it.
Mate fireflies (Lampyris noctiluca)
Image courtesy of: wiki
Each firefly in the same area has its own unique signal language, each flashing its own, and no one disturbs anyone.
But some species of female fireflies are more powerful, mastering "foreign languages" and responding to the courtship of other types of males - but people are not planning to fall in love, but just want to eat the little unlucky eggs that have been attracted.
Odor signals
The aroma stinks and the amount of information is great
Our human senses are mainly visual and auditory, and smell is mainly used to identify food and avoid danger. But in fact, the odor released by chemicals is likely to be the earliest communication tool for animals.
Among mammals, there are many types of bad eyes, but only a few "strange things" such as primates and cetaceans have bad noses. Mammals emit odors through feces, urine, and secretory glands, and humans can at most smell a "stink" and a "commotion", while they themselves can smell a lot of hidden information such as each other's gender, age, health status, social level, and even their own blood relationship.
Among them, scientists have studied the most, perhaps the mouse.
In a brown rat colony, members will drop urine on each other's fur so that everyone smells the same and is easy to identify. The high-level male rats in the rat group have a stronger "aura" emitted by the smell of urine, and the low-level male rats will be afraid and avoided after smelling, while the female rats are more likely to be in heat after smelling.
Brown rats prefer to live in groups, identifying each other's status by the smell of urine
Because of their ability to convey information, these smellable chemicals are also known as "pheromones."
Compared to visual signals, pheromones travel a long distance and are simple to process. This is especially important for small insects, such as social insects such as bees, ants and termites, and the communication network of the entire group is channeled by pheromones.
Pheromones can also greatly improve the efficiency of finding objects. For example, the female pear silkworm moth can emit the odor to 8 kilometers away, where the male only needs to smell a few molecules to come to the female moth within an hour.
Tactile signals
Touching and clapping, it's all about communicating
When you go to the zoo as a child, you must have seen monkeys sitting together and combing each other's hair. Some say they're catching lice, and others say they're looking for salt grains to eat.
In fact, grooming is an indispensable social for monkeys, an important means of connecting feelings and consolidating their position. The monkey king in the macaque group does not need to groom himself, and other monkeys will rush to help him; and the monkeys with low status are often keen to groom the monkeys with high status, but they are too lazy to interact with other "poor brothers".
Macaques spend at least 2 to 3 hours a day huddled together to groom and enhance their feelings through physical contact. Pictured here is a guinea-tailed macaque on the island of Kalimantan.
Body language such as leaning on each other, stroking, and slapping is common in the social etiquette of many animals, and can even change each other's behavior like switches.
For example, the pups of many mammals, such as cats, dogs, rats, rabbits, etc., as long as they are picked up by their mothers, they will enter a "petrified state" and be at the mercy of them.
When Chinese fighting fish courtship, the male will repeatedly peck and squeeze the female's body, so as to stimulate the female to ovulate.
For spiders, tactile signals can even save lives.
Spiders are all masters of touch, their 8 long legs are not white, they have keen tactile receptors on them, which can identify prey and judge danger through the vibration of spider webs or the ground. Spiders generally choose prey smaller than their own size, so when it comes to courtship, the male spider is in danger of being eaten by the "bride" - the female spider is generally larger than the male spider.
Recent studies have shown that some species of male spiders do use tactile signals to indicate their identity when stepping on the webs of female spiders. For example, the Black Widow spider in the Americas will quickly perform several rock-like "plucking" movements, if the performance is good, the female spider will not attack; if the action is not standard, it may end up dying in place.
The female of the Black Widow spider is more than 4 times larger than the male
Signal
Generate electricity with love and connect with the same kind
The electric eel, which can release 500 volts of high-voltage electricity with a single shock, is not the only one that has mastered this magical skill: at least 500 species of fish have similar dischargers.
However, most of them do not have such a strong discharge ability as electric eels, and the main function of the current they emit is not to predate, but to perceive the environment and contact the same kind.
Eel
Image courtesy of Tennessee Aquarium
Fish that can generate electricity generally live in rivers and bays with turbid water quality, and their eyesight is almost useless in these places. So in evolution, their eyes became small and weak, but they had the ability to discharge electricity into water. The organs that release and sense the current can be used as "radar" with the lateral line, which can easily lock on to prey, find obstacles and predators.
More than 200 species of long-jawed fish in Africa, each emitting a unique frequency and type of electric field, can identify their kind in a muddy water without the need for other signals. Some species of long-jawed fish even use electric fields to communicate with each other in hunting and foraging to achieve a certain degree of cooperative combat.
Long-jawed fish
In fact, because water is far more electrically conductive than air, animals form a "bioelectric field" in the water, and most fish can also perceive this electric field.
Some scientists believe that sardines, anchovies and other fish swimming in clusters have the same electric field frequency for each fish in the school. This allows everyone to grasp the movements of their partners at any time, so that the entire fish movement is coordinated and in step.
Therefore, we think that there is no communication between animals, but in fact, people are rattling every day...
Written by | Ran Hao
WeChat Editor | glad
This article was originally published in the February 2016 issue of Naturalist