Dan Blumstein: UCLA Department of Organismic Biology, Ecology and Evolution

Many prey species signal when they encounter a predator. For over a decade I’ve used anti-predator communication as a model for understanding the evolution of complex communication in general. I will summarize results, primarily focusing on my work with marmots–large, alpine ground squirrels found throughout the Northern hemisphere. I will talk about recent work on the evolution of alarm communication in rodents as well as in marmots, and the current adaptive utility of alarm communication. Surprisingly, it seems that alarm calls first evolved as a form of detection signalling primarily directed to predators. Calling has subsequently been exapted to have a conspecific alarm function. Much of my work has focused on the meaning of alarm calls. While marmots don’t seem to have functionally referential communicative abilities, they do encode risk in a variety of ways. Much recent work has focused on the somewhat paradoxical question of why calls might be individually specific. Evaluating caller reliability seems to be the key to selecting for the ability to distinguish among callers.
http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Blumstein_12-6-04.pdf