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© Newswise.
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How Animals Communicate Using Vibration
Scholars To Discuss How Animals Communicate Using Vibration Can an electromechanical vibration exciter fool a prairie mole cricket? And why do desert rodents drum their feet? Ten scientists and engineers from the United States and Austria will meet in Chicago on Jan. 4 for the first scientific gathering of its kind convened to discuss research on vibration signals used by animals. The meeting was conceived by University of Tulsa biology professor Peggy Hill, who studies the rare prairie mole cricket. The symposium, titled "Vibration as a Communication Channel," is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Animal Behavior Society and hosted by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Talks will describe use of vibration in predator defense, prey detection, recruitment to food, mating behavior, and maternal/brood social interactions, as well as synthetic signals sent back to animals, and channels through which signals are gathered and processed. "Computers and hardware such as the geophone, used to listen for footfalls in the jungles of Vietnam, now allow researchers to answer increasingly sophisticated questions about how animals send and receive signals," says Hill. She says scientists have known for some time that leafcutter ants use vibration to recruit foragers, or to signal for help when buried alive, but the use of vibration in animal communication is much more ubiquitous than previously thought. It occurs among insects, frogs, kangaroo rats, elephants and bison. In her work on the prairie mole cricket in northeast Oklahoma, Hill has found that while the males "sing" from their burrows to attract females, they also seem to be sending vibrations through the ground that keep the other fellows at a reasonable distance from each other. Hill collaborates with acoustics expert John Shadley, a TU mechanical engineering professor who uses geophones to record incoming cricket vibrations and the electromechanical vibration exciter or "soil shaker" to "talk back" to the crickets. The symposium will be held in the Hilton Chicago, 720 S. Michigan Ave. Speakers, their affiliations and their topics include the following: • Friedrick G. Barth, University of Vienna, "Vibration and Behavior: The Shaky World of Spiders." • Philip Brownell, Oregon State University, "Vibration Sensitivity and Prey-Localizing Behavior of Sand Scorpions: From Sensory Encoding to Quantitative Model." • Rex Cocroft, University of Missouri, "Vibrational Communication and the Ecology of Group-Living Insects." • Peggy S. M. Hill, The University of Tulsa, "Vibration and Animal Communication: A Review." • Randy Hunt, Indiana University Southeast, "Mating Behavior in Leafhoppers and Treehoppers: Involvement of Vibrational Signals in Male-Male Competition and Female Preference." • Edwin R. Lewis, University of California-Berkeley, "Do White-Lipped Frogs Use Seismic Signals for Intraspecific Communication?" • Peter Narins, University of California-Los Angeles, "Good Vibrations: Seismic Signal Use by Fossorial Mammals." • Caitlin O'Connell-Rodwell, Stanford University, "Exploring the Possibility of Low-Frequency Seismic Communication in Elephants and Other Large Mammals." • Jan Randall, San Francisco State University, "Why Do Desert Rodents Drum their Feet?" • John R. Shadley, The University of Tulsa, "Talking Back: Sending Soil Vibrational Signals to Lekking Prairie Mole Cricket Males." For further information contact Peggy Hill at (918) 631-2992, or by e-mail: peggy-hill@utulsa.edu. Abstracts are available at the web site: http://www.sicb.org # # # Rolf Olsen
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