False Alarm Calls
Deceptive alarm calls are used by male swallows (Hirundo rustica). Males give these false alarm calls when females leave the nest area during the mating season, and are thus able to disrupt extra-pair copulations. As this is likely to be costly to females, it can be seen as an example of sexual conflict.
Counterfeit alarm calls are also used by thrushes to avoid intraspecific competition. By sounding a bogus alarm call normally used to warn of aerial predators, they can frighten other birds away, allowing them to eat undisturbed.
Vervets seem to be able to understand the referent of alarm calls instead of merely the acoustic properties, and if another species' specific alarm call (terrestrial or aerial predator, for instance) is used incorrectly with too high of a regularity, the vervet will learn to ignore the analogous vervet call as well.
Read more about this topic: Alarm Signal
Famous quotes containing the words false, alarm and/or calls:
“Yet things are knowable! They are knowable, because, being from one, things correspond. There is a scale: and the correspondence of heaven to earth, of matter to mind, of the part to the whole, is our guide. As there is a science of stars, called astronomy; and science of quantities, called mathematics; a science of qualities, called chemistry; so there is a science of sciences,—I call it Dialectic,—which is the Intellect discriminating the false and the true.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.”
—Lewis Thomas (b. 1913)
“The mark of the man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly, promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and the unlocking of his learning and philosophy.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)