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How do animals use substrate-borne vibrations as an information source?

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Abstract

Animal communication is a dynamic field that promotes cross-disciplinary study of the complex mechanisms of sending and receiving signals, the neurobiology of signal detection and processing, and the behaviors of animals creating and responding to encoded messages. Alongside visual signals, songs, or pheromones exists another major communication channel that has been rather neglected until recent decades: substrate-borne vibration. Vibrations carried in the substrate are considered to provide a very old and apparently ubiquitous communication channel that is used alone or in combination with other information channels in multimodal signaling. The substrate could be ‘the ground’, or a plant leaf or stem, or the surface of water, or a spider’s web, or a honeybee’s honeycomb. Animals moving on these substrates typically create incidental vibrations that can alert others to their presence. They also may use behaviors to create vibrational waves that are employed in the contexts of mate location and identification, courtship and mating, maternal care and sibling interactions, predation, predator avoidance, foraging, and general recruitment of family members to work. In fact, animals use substrate-borne vibrations to signal in the same contexts that they use vision, hearing, touch, taste, or smell. Study of vibrational communication across animal taxa provides more than just a more complete story. Communication through substrate-borne vibration has its own constraints and opportunities not found in other signaling modalities. Here, I review the state of our understanding of information acquisition via substrate-borne vibrations with special attention to the most recent literature.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my research colleague, John R. Shadley, for making it possible for me to pursue this interest in vibrational communication and my many colleagues in the field for doing such beautiful work with their own focal species. I thank Naturwissenschaften Managing Editor Tatiana Czeschlik for her encouragement and interest in my work. I also thank Karen Warkentin and four anonymous referees for comments made in review that helped to improve and strengthen this paper. Lastly, I thank my newest colleague, Daniel R. Howard, for his thoughtful comments and for being my second set of eyes. Dan also provided photographs for the online version.

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  1. The University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK, 74104, USA

    Peggy S. M. Hill

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  1. Peggy S. M. Hill
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Correspondence to Peggy S. M. Hill.

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Supplementary Fig. 4

Female Wellington tree weta (Hemideina crassidens) from Matiu/Somes Islands Scientific and Historic Reserve, Wellington Harbor, North Island, New Zealand. In the New Zealand Anostostomatidae (giant weta, tree weta, and ground weta), most species are known to produce some form of an acoustic signal. However, several species, including those in the genus Hemideina, exhibit behaviors that are likely involved in the production of substrate-borne vibrations (McVean and Field 1996). Photograph reproduced with permission of Daniel R. Howard. (DOC 3,110 kb)

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Hill, P.S.M. How do animals use substrate-borne vibrations as an information source?. Naturwissenschaften 96, 1355–1371 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-009-0588-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-009-0588-8

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