Animal signals

their prominence can be hard for even a casual observer to overlook. Animal signals therefore raise many scientific questions: What are their functions? What information do they transmit? How are they produced? And why did they evolve? Pioneering empirical work on animal signals was carried out by Karl von Frisch, Konrad Lorenz, and Niko Tinbergen, three ethologists who were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1973. Karl von Frisch decoded the famous ‘waggle dance’ of honey bees, showing that seemingly insignificant dancing motions that bees make inside the hive can tell other colony members the precise location of distant food sources. Lorenz integrated himself into the daily activities of geese, allowing them to imprint on him, and he thereby identified many of the nuances of their communication. Niko Tinbergen, an astute field observer, disentangled signals that gulls and other animals use in territorial conflicts. Tinbergen was also responsible for bestowing an essential framework for studying animal signals — his ‘four questions’ about the phylogeny, function, development and mechanism of Animal signals