HILL, P.S.M.: Vibration and Animal Communication: a Review.

Vibration through the substrate has likely been important to animals as a channel of communication for millions of years, but our literature on vibration in this context of biologically relevant information is a feature of essentially the last 30 years. Morphologists know that the jaw mechanism of early amphibians allowed them to perceive vibration through the substrate as their large heads lay on the ground. Although the exact mechanism of vibration production and the precise nature of the wave produced are not always understood, recent development of affordable instrumentation to detect and measure vibrations has allowed researchers to answer increasingly sophisticated questions about how animals send and receive signals through this medium. We have known for some time that leafcutter ants use vibration to recruit foragers, or to signal for help when buried alive, but the study of vibration in animal communication is still a relatively young field. Some of us were forced to explore the use of vibration when all other attempts to manipulate animals in the field had failed. Others began to think about vibration to explain some of the puzzling behaviors of species they were studying in other contexts. Since then, it has become clear that the use of vibration in animal communication is much more ubiquitous than previously imagined. We now know that vibration provides information used in predator defense, prey detection, recruitment to food, mate choice, intrasexual competition, and maternal/brood social interactions in a variety of insect orders, spiders, crabs, scorpions, chameleons, frogs, golden moles, mole rats, kangaroo rats, elephants and bison.