• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

How Do Animals Know When It’s Their Turn To Communicate?

May 3, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Taking turns to communicate isn’t just a thing that humans do in polite conversation – plenty of other animals also avoid overlapping each other. But not every animal “talks” – so how do those that still appear to take turns know when to do so? A new study examining the aggressive back and forth of Siamese fighting fish holds some potential answers about the role of visual cues.

Advertisement

The study, which is a preprint and so is yet to be peer-reviewed, analyzed the very beginning of aggressive encounters between Siamese fighting fish (Betta splendens), commonly called bettas. Known as the display phase, the fish take turns flaring their gills – it’s like a dance where one tries to intimidate the other, causing someone to either scarper or start a fight.

Advertisement
Close up of a multicoloured siamese fighting fish (betta) flaring its gills, isolated on a black background.

A grumpy, gill-flaring betta.

Image credit: I Putu Krisna Wiranata/Shutterstock.com

To figure out which elements of this display might give cues for turn-taking, the researchers observed bettas exposed to either other real bettas, or natural-looking animations set up on a screen next to the tank, developed using photographs and motion tracking of a real male betta.

Though analysis revealed that sometimes the riled-up bettas don’t always wait for their turn to flare – not entirely dissimilar to humans when they start talking over each other in an argument – they usually do and the cues to do so involve speed and orientation. 

The team found that the betta preferred to flare at an animated fish when the virtual recreation was close to the water’s surface and turned broadside, suggesting orientation acts as a cue. It could also be assumed that one fish would need to see the other fish flare in order to know to wait for its turn, but surprisingly, this seems not to matter.

ⓘ IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.

Advertisement

“We found that the virtual (stimulus) fish does not need to flare for the real opponent to wait for its turn. Instead, changes in orientation and speed are sufficient,” wrote one of the study’s authors, Andres Bendesky, on X.

That’s not to say gill flaring isn’t important to the conversation as a whole, though; the study instead proposes that it helps to keep the fish engaged in the aggressive communication for longer. The researchers also identified the part of a betta’s brain that appears to play a role in this engagement, a region called the dorsomedial telencephalon that’s homologous to our own amygdala.

There are a multitude of other animals that also show turn-taking behavior. A 2018 review covered a wide range of them, including insects that alternate vibrations – cicadas being one – and bioluminescence, to great apes that use sound and gesture. 

Scientists hope that such research into turn-taking might help in understanding how communication evolved – even when it comes to human language.

Advertisement

The preprint is posted to bioRxiv.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. China’s Aug export growth unexpectedly picks up speed, imports solidly up
  2. Bolivian president calls for global debt relief for poor countries
  3. Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via FoodTech
  4. Humanity’s Journey To A Metal-Rich Asteroid Launches Today. Here’s How To Watch

Source Link: How Do Animals Know When It’s Their Turn To Communicate?

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • This Cute Creature Has One Of The Largest Genomes Of Any Mammal, With 114 Chromosomes
  • Little Air And Dramatic Evolutionary Changes Await Future Humans On Mars
  • “Black Hole Stars” Might Solve Unexplained JWST Discovery
  • Pretty In Purple: Why Do Some Otters Have Purple Teeth And Bones? It’s All Down To Their Spiky Diets
  • The World’s Largest Carnivoran Is A 3,600-Kilogram Giant That Weighs More Than Your Car
  • Devastating “Rogue Waves” Finally Have An Explanation
  • Meet The “Masked Seducer”, A Unique Bat With A Never-Before-Seen Courtship Display
  • Alaska’s Salmon River Is Turning Orange – And It’s A Stark Warning
  • Meet The Heaviest Jelly In The Seas, Weighing Over Twice As Much As A Grand Piano
  • For The First Time, We’ve Found Evidence Climate Change Is Attracting Invasive Species To Canadian Arctic
  • What Are Microfiber Cloths, And How Do They Clean So Well?
  • Stowaway Rat That Hopped On A Flight From Miami Was A “Wake-Up Call” For Global Health
  • Andromeda, Solar Storms, And A 1 Billion Pixel Image Crowned Best Astrophotos Of The Year
  • New Island Emerges In Alaska As Glacier Rapidly Retreats, NASA Satellite Imagery Shows
  • With A New Drug Cocktail, Scientists May Have Finally Found Flu’s Universal Weak Spot
  • Battered Skull Confirms Roman Amphitheaters Were Beastly For Bears
  • Mine Spiders Bigger Than A Burger Patty Lurk Deep In Abandoned Caves
  • Blackout Zones: The Places On Earth Where Magnetic Compasses Don’t Work
  • What Is Actually Happening When You Get Blackout Drunk? An Ethically Dubious Experiment Found Out
  • Koalas Get A Shot At Survival As World-First Chlamydia Vaccine Gets Approval
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version