Animal Vocal Communication: A New Approach - Softcover

Owings, Donald H.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 052103129X ISBN 13: 9780521031295

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Synopsis

This book will be a landmark text for all those interested in animal communication. Animal Vocal Communication explicitly avoids human-centred concepts and approaches and links communication to fundamental biological processes instead. It offers a conceptual framework - assessment/management - that allows us to integrate detailed studies of communication with an understanding of evolutionary perspectives. Self-interested assessment is placed on par with the signal production (management) side of communication, and communication is viewed as reflecting regulatory processes. Signals are used to manage the behaviour of others by exploiting their active assessment. The authors contend that it is this interplay between management and assessment that results in the functioning and evolution of animal communication; it is what communicative behaviour accomplishes that is important, not what information is conveyed.

About this title

About the Author

Eugene Morton attended Denison University (BS), the University of the Pacific, Cornell University (MS) and completed his PhD at Yale University, with pre- and postdoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Dr Morton was a Professor at the University of Maryland and a Senior Scientist at the Smithsonian Institution until his retirement in 2005. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at York University in Toronto and Director of the Hemlock Hill Field Station near Cambridge Springs, PA, where students from the University of Maryland, Princeton University, York University and Allegheny College have pursued research for degrees. Dr Morton specializes in migratory bird behavioral ecology, mating systems in birds and saturniid moths, animal communication and avian/plant co-evolution. He has written or edited several books, including Animal Talk (1991) and The Smithsonian Book of Birds (1990) (both with Jake Page), Migrant Birds in the Neotropics (1982) and The Behavioral Ecology of Tropical Birds (2001, with Bridget Stutchbury).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 052103129X
• ISBN 13: 9780521031295
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300