SOMETIMES WORDS ARE NOT ENOUGH

Learn about 12 Ways Animals Communicate with Each Other

Image: Syed Ahmad

From the majestic whales that traverse the ocean depths to the tiny ants orchestrating their complex colonies, animals employ an astonishing array of communication methods to convey information, establish social bonds, and navigate the challenges of their environments.

Whether through intricate dances, melodic songs, chemical signals, or the subtle nuances of body language, the animal kingdom is a vibrant testament to the myriad ways in which creatures express themselves. So join us on a journey into the fascinating world of interspecies communication, where the sounds of nature transcend the boundaries of language as we know it.

Image: David Clode

In the world of animal communication, the dances performed by various species reveal a rich language of expressions and interactions, just like they do with us. Observing bees in their hives, Karl Von Frisch uncovered a phenomenon known as the "waggle dance": upon discovering a food source, the bees returned to the hive and engaged in a dance, with fellow bees touching their abdomens. This dance communicated precise information about the direction and distance of the newfound sustenance.

The world of tiny dancers extends beyond the buzzing bees. For example, the peacock spider taps its legs to attract nearby female spiders. And clark’s grebes engage in a synchronized water ballet when seeking a mate.

Image: Nam Anh

The African elephant and the tarsier represent the extremes of the auditory spectrum. African elephants produce low-frequency vibrations below 20 hertz, imperceptible to the human ear. This method of communication transcends great distances, with an infrasound signal from one elephant reaching another over 175 miles away.

On the opposite end, the tarsier, a tiny primate, emits frequencies exceeding 20,000 Hertz—sounds beyond our hearing range. This high-pitched communication serves the tarsier well in the jungle cacophony, allowing them to exchange vital information about potential threats beyond the reach of predators.

Image: Jonathan Diemel

Cephalopods are masters of the color spectrum. They employ their remarkable ability to change hues for a lot of communicative purposes. Squid and cuttlefish utilize this skill not only to signal their availability for mating but also to assert their territorial dominance or ward off potential threats.

Octopuses, on the other hand, make good use of their color-changing abilities as a camouflage technique and a defensive signal. A sudden shift to white with black accents around their eyes communicates a feeling of vulnerability and a potential readiness to defend.

Image: David Clode

Some fish, like eels, use electricity as their conversational medium. Eels can generate electric fields with a potential of up to one volt, creating a unique form of communication.

Employing specialized electroreceptors, these fish receive signals transmitted through electric waves. Upon reception, the fish deciphers the signal's frequency and waveform, revealing the language encoded within.

Image: Nicole Wreyford

The white rhinoceros creates communal defecation sites called middens. This site acts as a type of rhino message board, as the feces contain all sorts of biological and societal information.

A midden can communicate who rules that specific area. The dominant male rhino will often defecate directly in the middle of the midden and kick around his waist, both to spread his smell around the midden and to get it stuck on his feet so that others can recognize the scent wherever he goes.

Whistles, Growls, and Hums

Image: Amy Reed

Moving into the world of verbal communication, animals showcase an amazing array of vocal prowess. Dholes, the fox-wolf lookalikes, break away from their canid relatives by employing whistles, clucks, and eerie shrieks across their expansive territories of up to 35 square miles.

Silverback gorillas command attention through humming, using it as a bell of sorts to call their group. Similarly, chimps and bonobos prove to be noisy eaters, shedding light on primate social structures through their vocalizations. Yet, prairie dogs steal the show in the complexity of their linguistic skills, using distinct calls to identify approaching predators.

Image: Svetozar Cenisev

Residing exclusively underground, the African demon mole rats have adopted a headbanging strategy to send messages to their fellow mole rats. Thumping their heads against the tunnel ceilings, these rhythmic vibrations travel through the earth, serving as a unique language in the subterranean darkness.

The pace and intensity of these percussive signals become the code of communication, allowing the demon mole rats to convey a range of meanings to their rodent companions. In the depths of the earth, where conventional sound dissipates quickly, these headbangers have found a method both unconventional and effective to transmit vital information.

Image: Vincent van Zalinge

We have been using songs to convey all kinds of emotions, birds are known to use their songs for different purposes too. In a unique mating strategy, the female Peruvian warbling antbird disrupts her partner's harmonious song to thwart potential rivals, turning their love song into a discordant domestic dispute that ensures fidelity in the avian courtship.

Another example of a bird using its song for a curious purpose is the Australian male fairy-wren: despite the threat of butcher birds, the male fairy-wrens exhibit an audacious strategy called "vocal hitchhiking". When a nearby butcher bird issues a call, male fairy-wrens boldly respond, showcasing their bravado to attract the attention of female wrens.

Image: Flavio

The sperm whales engage in a sophisticated language of clicking sounds known as "codas". These acoustic signals serve as a means of conveying information among the whales, creating a complex system akin to regional dialects.

Remarkably, sperm whales in distinct oceanic areas exhibit variations in their clicking patterns, giving rise to unique auditory signatures. Recent findings suggest the possibility of delicate variations not only between different regional groups but potentially within individual clans or even among specific whales.

Image: Tyler Quiring

Ravens communicate with each other through a distinctive form of gesticulation. Much like humans employing hand movements to emphasize points, ravens use their beaks and wings to transmit messages.

In a fascinating display, they show or offer items such as moss, stones, or twigs, often directed towards potential mates. This sign language extends beyond solo performances, with ravens showcasing interactive behaviors like clasping their bills together or collaboratively moving an object.

Image: Jonathan Mast

European bison communicate in a subtle yet powerful form, where their massive frames belie a soft-spoken language. When these herds decide to move, leadership emerges not from a dominant figure but through a communal decision-making process.

Any member of the herd, regardless of age or gender, can initiate the movement by taking a decisive 20 or more steps in a chosen direction without pausing to graze. The others, trusting this directional choice, simply follow suit. In this unique system, the leading individual becomes the de facto leader.

Image: Shashank Hudkar

In southeastern Brazil resides the black-fronted titi, a primate with a sophisticated communication system. Their remarkably dense alarm calls showcase a linguistic prowess uncommon in the animal kingdom.

The black-fronted titi stands out as one of the few species capable of syntax, expertly combining different language units into what can be considered "sentences." Their squeaking calls differentiate between ground- and sky-based threats, with rising pitches signaling the approach of caracaras, and long-legged hawks, while fading calls indicate lurking predatory cats.

Let’s get candy!

Read about the chocolate bar that took this sports icon to court and won

You may bite into a Milky Way bar and think of stars, when it’s really about an old-fashioned milkshake. Maybe it’s Life Savers you like but don’t know that their name refers exactly to the object they resemble. Candy names have some intriguing stories behind them: a beloved horse, a president's daughter, a boy who charmed the girls at the corner shop. Grab your favorite treat, and read about 10 confectionery brands and why they are called that.

Few candy names have sparked as much debate as Baby Ruth. When the Curtiss Candy Company relaunched its Kandy Kake as Baby Ruth in 1921, baseball legend Babe Ruth was in the middle of a record-setting season, having just hit 54 home runs the year before.

Naturally, everyone assumed the candy was cashing in on his fame. But Curtiss always insisted otherwise, claiming the bar honored Ruth Cleveland, the daughter of former President Grover Cleveland, who had died of diphtheria back in 1904 at just 12 years old. Skeptics point out the timing seemed suspicious, especially since Curtiss's factory sat on the very same Chicago street as Wrigley Field. When the real Babe Ruth tried to sell his own candy bar in 1926, Curtiss took him to court over the name and won. To this day, the company has never had to pay him a cent.

When Mars, Incorporated launched the 3 Musketeers bar in 1932, right in the middle of the Great Depression, it wasn't one candy bar at all. It was three separate mini bars in a single wrapper, one flavored chocolate, one strawberry, and one vanilla, a nod to Alexandre Dumas's classic novel, The Three Musketeers.

At just five cents, families could split the three flavors between them, which made the bar an instant hit during hard economic times. Everything changed a decade later. When the United States government rationed sugar during World War II, Mars could no longer justify producing three separate nougat flavors. The company kept only the most popular one, chocolate, and reshaped it into the single, larger bar recognized today. The name stuck around even after two of its three namesakes disappeared from the wrapper.

The story behind Snickers begins not with chocolate, but with a horse. In 1930, Frank and Ethel Mars owned Milky Way Farm, a sprawling 2,800-acre property in Pulaski, Tennessee, where they raised prize Thoroughbred racehorses. One of their favorites was a horse named Snickers.

Around the same time, the Mars candy company was preparing to launch a new bar combining nougat, caramel, peanuts, and milk chocolate, and it still needed a name. According to family accounts, Snickers the horse died shortly before the bar's debut, and the Mars family decided to honor their beloved animal by naming their new candy after him. The bar has kept that name in the United States ever since, though in the United Kingdom it was oddly sold as Marathon until 1990, when Mars finally unified the branding for most countries.

Back in 1923, Frank C. Mars ran a modest candy operation out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. His son Forrest, reunited with his father after years of a strained relationship due to his parents’ divorce, suggested turning a popular soda fountain treat, the malted milkshake, into something you could carry in your pocket. Frank combined whipped nougat with malt flavoring, and the Milky Way bar was born.

Many assume the name pays tribute to the galaxy, especially given the family surname, Mars. But the real inspiration was far closer to home: the taste and name came straight from those creamy malted shakes soda jerks were slinging across America at the time. The bar was such a hit that it grossed roughly $800,000 in its very first year, which equals roughly $15.6 million today. The chocolate remains the oldest candy bar still made by Mars, Incorporated.

In 1923, the Curtiss Candy Company of Chicago, Illinois, needed a name for its new chocolate-covered peanut butter bar, so founder Otto Schnering did something unusual: he asked the public.

The company launched a naming contest through mail-in entries, and a participant from Chicago suggested Butterfinger, borrowing a term sportscasters used for baseball players who couldn't hold onto the ball. The name stuck immediately. Schnering, who had already scored a hit with the Baby Ruth bar, leaned into showmanship to promote his new candy. He famously had airplanes drop thousands of Butterfinger bars, each rigged with a tiny parachute, over American cities like New York and Atlanta. Nearly a century later, the bar's crispy, flaky center is still instantly recognizable, even if most people eating one today have no idea it's named after a baseball insult.

In 1949, candy maker James O. Welch was ready to launch a new chocolate-covered peppermint from his company in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For the name, he reached back to a personal favorite: Junior Miss, a Broadway play based on Sally Benson's New Yorker stories, which had run from 1941 to 1943 and even inspired a radio show starring Shirley Temple. Even though the play had already closed six years earlier, this was his way to honor it. Food chemist Charles Vaughan, who also created Sugar Babies for the same company, was the one who actually developed the chocolate-covered mint.

Long before it was a chocolate bar, Kit Kat was a mutton pie. In early 1700s London, a pastry cook named Christopher Catling ran a pie house on Shire Lane near Temple Bar, where his savory pies, nicknamed Kit-Kats after his own nickname (a nod to his own name), became so popular that a gathering of politicians from the Whig party and writers started meeting there regularly. They eventually became known as the Kit-Cat Club.

Two centuries later, in 1911, the English candy company Rowntree's trademarked the names Kit Kat and Kit Cat, likely as a nod to that historic club. The chocolate wafer bar itself, originally called Rowntree's Chocolate Crisp, didn't take on the Kit Kat name until 1937. It was a clever way to tie a new treat to old British tradition.

When Hershey's introduced its little chocolate drops in 1907, the candy needed a name that matched its size and shape. The most repeated explanation involves the factory machines themselves: as they dropped dollops of chocolate onto a moving conveyor belt, the motion and sound reportedly resembled a smacking kiss, and the name Hershey's Kisses was born.

However, the word "kiss" was simply common candy-making slang at the time for a small, bite-sized treat, so the truth may be a little less romantic than the story suggests. What's certain is that the Kisses were originally wrapped by hand until 1921, when a new machine automated the process and added the paper plume, that little strip peeking out of the foil, so shoppers could tell a genuine Hershey's Kiss from a copycat. Milton Hershey trademarked the shape in 1924, and the candy has barely changed since.

According to company legend, the Oh Henry! bar owes its name to a charming young man named Henry who used to stop by George Williamson's candy shop in Chicago sometime around 1920.

Henry became a favorite of the young women working behind the counter, who often sent him on errands, calling out "Oh, Henry!" whenever they needed his help. Williamson supposedly overheard the phrase so often that he decided to name his new peanut, caramel, and fudge bar after it. Not everyone buys the story, though. Some chocolate buffs believe the bar actually started as the Tom Henry Bar, invented by a candy maker in Kansas and later sold to Williamson, who simply renamed it. Whichever version is true, the Williamson Candy Company trademarked Oh Henry! in 1922, and the catchy exclamation has stuck around for more than a century.

In the summer of 1912, Cleveland chocolate maker Clarence Crane had a problem: his chocolates kept melting in the heat, and sales always dropped once summer arrived.

Looking for a candy that could survive warm weather, Crane borrowed an idea from an unlikely source, a pharmacist's pill-making machine, which pressed round, flat tablets instead of the square mints then popular in Europe. The machine happened to punch a small hole through the center of each mint. Rather than see it as a flaw, Crane noticed the shape resembled a ring-style life preserver used on ships, and he named his new peppermint candy Life Savers. He sold the rights just a year later, in 1913, to businessman Edward Noble for $2,900 —something close to $100,000 today— who switched the packaging to tinfoil and turned it into one of the best-selling candies in American history.