Two Great Japanese Tits communicating with one another
As the most evolved species on the planet, humans have developed multiple characteristics lacking in our animal forefathers. And since pride is definitely one of those characteristics we’ve evolved separately, we’re also often certain that no other creatures can do what we do.
And as a general rule, that’s true. But some things, no matter how outlandish it may sound, we’ve evolved alongside other unlikely species of animals. And the more complex they are, the harder we find it to believe that some other creature managed to put it together like we did.
One such recent discovery that surprised scientists all over the world is that syntax was developed by great tits for communication. The study was performed by a team of Japanese scientists and it was published on Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications.
According to Toshitaka N. Suzuki, the study’s lead author,
Our study shows, for the first time, that birds, like humans, use the rules of syntax to chat with others. This finding reveals an unsuspected degree of semantic complexity in avian vocal communication.
But how exactly does that work, and how did the team of researchers analyzing the Japanese great tits manage to discover that the birds were privy to this complex form of language? Well, they did so like pretty much any scientific study – by paying attention to them and spending a lot of time studying them.
Observing the variety of chirps produced by the birds, the researchers managed to divide these sounds into notes; for the sake of easing their work, they named these individual notes A, B, C, and D. But it doesn’t stop there – the team also paid attention to how the notes were used in longer chirps.
It turns out that A, B, and C were used together with one another, and that D was only used on its own, although multiple times in a row (AB, BC, ABC, or DDDDDDDD). And each combination seemed to mean something else. For the study, the team used two combinations.
ABC was used by the birds to signal the others to scan the horizon, probably looking for a predator. Meanwhile, D called the other birds to the source of the call. By playing combinations of the notes through a radio, the researchers managed to get the birds to react to the played noises like they did to the real thing.
But this is where the fun began. When playing an ABC-D combination, the birds first scanned the environment and then headed towards the caller. When attempting to play D-ABC, however, the birds did neither of the two established things, instead showing looks of confusion.
According to Suzuki,
These findings demonstrate that Japanese great tits have evolved compositional syntax by which different meanings are combined into a compound meaning through a note-ordering rule. This proves that compositional syntax is not unique to human language but may have evolved independently in animals as one of the basic mechanisms of information transmission.
Image source: Wikimedia
