Jungle babble is anything but

There's a fascinating article in The New York Times detailing the way some animals not only possess an animal-specific vocabulary for sounding the alarm about predators (e.g., one cry for a leopard; another for an eagle), and listen to each other's warnings (across species), but are able to filter out irrelevant alarms (e.g., a bird ignoring a monkey's shriek of "Leopard!", but taking note when it warns "Eagle!").

Olivia Jones/ The Wild Side - "Leopard Behind You!" (The New York Times, Oct 6, 2009)

This isn’t a complicated vocabulary, with thousands of words. Nonetheless, it’s clear that for many animals, alarm calls are more than simple squawks of fear. Vervet monkeys, for instance, use different sounds to warn of different types of predator. “Leopard!” is not the same as “snake!” or “eagle!” If you hide a loudspeaker in the bushes, and startle unsuspecting monkeys by playing recordings of “snake!” at them, they will look around at the ground. “Eagle!” makes them look up. “Leopard!” sends them scampering to the trees.

Masha'Allah, simply amazing.  I wonder how easy this is to explain using using natural selection.

Comments

[Abul Layth]

Studies in dolphin communication certainly beat the few sounds of a monkey!

[svend]

Hadn't thought of that, but you're no doubt right. Still, I found the "multi-lingual" aspect of this fascinating. I wonder if dolphins pay any attention to the signs of other fishes or in their environment.

[Theron Ware]

" I wonder how easy this is to explain using using natural selection."
It would be fairly easy to do so; however, the development may have nothing to do with natural selection but be a cultural development: if cries have the same significance in all or most populations, including populations that have been isolated from one another for a long time, they are probably a result of natura selection. If cries have different meanings in different places then a cultural influence is likely.

[Ibrahim]

Well, Olivia Jones is an evolutionary biologist and a natural selection advocate. I'm sure there's a natural selection explanation, but when you have a single outlook about the natural world, it's not difficult to customize an argument. That's never really an issue. Nor is the absence of a tenable argument proof of anything.