While humans seem to develop languages over the years and write, speak, and sign to communicate amongst themselves, so do animals, including the world of birds and insects. Some people may not yet have come across the height of complexities and means of disseminating essential knowledge they have developed, so here are some examples that I found to be uncommon.

The waggle dance done by a worker honey bee communicates the location of food to other bees. Once a worker finds a source of nectar, it returns to the hive with this vital information and dances while moving in a figure eight. In between the loops (at the center of the eight), it waggles its body for a length of time that indicates the distance from the hive, and the dancing angle shows the relation from the sun to the flower. Recent studies published by PNAS indicate how complex it is when conducting a few trials to understand what exactly is conveyed by the dance. After the waggle dance, scientists tried displacing the bees from the original location and observing if they would then struggle to find food. Surprisingly, they still flew biased to the source after a short journey in the direction informed by the dancer. This behavior indicates that bees have developed a robust enough communication system to learn not only directions from the dance but also the mental coordinates of the location of the food source within their self-made mental maps that they can then rely on not to lose themselves. The depth of non-verbal communication exceeds bounds in the insect world.

Bird calls often change in frequency and periods between bursts of sound when detecting a food source or a predator, as opposed to general bird calls. A small trial within experiments by Toshitaka N. Suzuki done in Japanese tit birds (Parus minor) showed that when scientists played general alarm calls, birds did not reach out to a dummy stick that was pulled using a string up a nearby tree at the same time in a snake-like fashion. This experiment controlled for many variables, including where it moved or how accurately the pretend snake moved. And in 10/12 of the trials, when snake calls were played, they reached within one meter of the tree where the dummy was. This shows that visual aid helped with the call to give a direction to their movement, but general alarms would not stimulate the exact response. The complexities between different alarm calls show how animals differentiate instructions to evade predators.

The Foxp2 gene regulates how proteins work in many brain regions, and its absence has been correlated in some research to speech impairments in humans. An experiment by Weiguo Shu and others tested the effect of disrupting this gene by inserting another gene into parts of its functional region, called exons, in mice to see the results.

All organisms have two copies of the entire list of chromosomes, one from each parent. In the experiment, premature death and motor impairments occurred when both copies of this were disrupted. Another consequence was that no more ultrasonic communication occurred when the young were separated from their mothers, which was a usual trend. When only one copy was disrupted, there was a difference in the ultrasonic vocalizations. These findings also included how they died prematurely and had impaired motor capabilities. This also serves as an example of how communication may depend on genes to some extent and how disordered genes can affect communication in animals.

Animals are vastly different in how they communicate, making them even more unique. I hope that seeing some of the unconventional forms that they do may help us appreciate the use of communication to coexist safely within ecosystems.