Overview
- An interdisciplinary team produced a 58-author review published this month in the journal Animal Behaviour that synthesizes evidence that calls, movements, colours, chemicals and vibrations enable cooperation across species.
- The paper distinguishes cues, which are informative but not evolved for communication, from signals, which natural selection has shaped to influence other species’ behaviour.
- Concrete examples include greater honeyguide birds guiding humans to bee nests, cleaner fish and shrimp signalling cleaning roles to larger reef fish, and warthogs using body postures to solicit avian or mammal cleaners.
- The authors document that some interspecies signals are stable and predictable while others vary by location or are learned, and they show how incidental cues can be co-opted into evolved signals over time.
- The review flags major gaps in taxonomic coverage and causal experiments and calls for coordinated, cross-discipline studies to test how signals originate, persist and affect ecosystems and human–wildlife interactions.