Animal Vocal Communication

A New Approach
Erscheinungsjahr 2006
ISBN: 978-0-521-03129-5
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 296 Seiten, Format (B × H): 159 mm x 237 mm, Gewicht: 438 g

This book will be a landmark text for all those interested in animal communication. Animal Vocal Communication explicitly avoids human-centred concepts and approaches and links communication to fundamental biological processes instead. It offers a conceptual framework - assessment/management - that allows us to integrate detailed studies of communication with an understanding of evolutionary perspectives. Self-interested assessment is placed on par with the signal production (management) side of communication, and communication is viewed as reflecting regulatory processes. Signals are used to manage the behaviour of others by exploiting their active assessment. The authors contend that it is this interplay between management and assessment that results in the functioning and evolution of animal communication; it is what communicative behaviour accomplishes that is important, not what information is conveyed.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Owings, Donald H.

Morton, Eugene S.

Fachgebiete

• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Tierkunde / Zoologie Tierökologie
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Tierkunde / Zoologie Tierethologie
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Neurobiologie, Verhaltensbiologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface; Acknowledgements; Prologue; 1. Overview of ideas; 2. The roles of assessment and management in communication; 3. Form and function in vocal communication; 4. Mechanisms and proximate processes of vocal communication; 5. Assessment/management - a viable replacement for the information concept; References; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Morton, Eugene S.
Eugene Morton attended Denison University (BS), the University of the Pacific, Cornell University (MS) and completed his PhD at Yale University, with pre- and postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Dr Morton was a Professor at the University of Maryland and a Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Institution until his retirement in 2005. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at York University in Toronto and Director of the Hemlock Hill Field Station near Cambridge Springs, PA, where students from the University of Maryland, Princeton University, York University and Allegheny College have pursued research for degrees. Dr Morton specializes in migratory bird behavioral ecology, mating systems in birds and saturniid moths, animal communication and avian/plant co-evolution. He has written or edited several books, including Animal Talk (1991) and The Smithsonian Book of Birds (1990) (both with Jake Page), Migrant Birds in the Neotropics (1982) and The Behavioral Ecology of Tropical Birds (2001, with Bridget Stutchbury).