Researchers at the University of Bayreuth have discovered that burying beetle larvae tend to have lower weights and higher mortality rates when their parents are unable to communicate acoustically during brood care. This study marks a first step in deciphering animal communication.

Communication is essential for the development of cooperative behavior, such as parental care. Animal family life involves a variety of interactions among family members, with species differing in the complexity of their social structures.

To understand the role communication plays in the evolution of family life—and how communication itself evolves with increasingly complex social interactions—a simpler system, such as that of the burying beetles, with only a few family members, must first be examined.

This new research, published in Animal Behaviour, offers insights into the evolution of social behaviors more broadly, aiding the decryption of animal communication.

Animals need to recognize and interact with potential mates, as well as care for their offspring during rearing. Although the central role of communication has long been acknowledged, the functions of individual signals often remain unexplored.

Some studies have already examined communication within insect family life, focusing mainly on chemical signals. Researchers at the University of Bayreuth, led by Dr. Taina Conrad at Professor Sandra Steiger’s Chair of Evolutionary Animal Ecology, have now published the first study examining the role of acoustic signals in burying beetles (Nicrophorus) before and during brood care.

Burying beetles display an unusually intense form of brood care for insects, with both parents tending to their young. They bury the carcass of a small mammal as a food source for the larvae before egg-laying. After the larvae hatch, both parents feed them, continuously emitting acoustic signals in the form of stridulation: The beetles create a chirping sound by rubbing the edges of their hardened wing cases against ridges on their abdomens.

“It’s surprising that we still know so little about the function of these stridulatory signals in burying beetles, given that Darwin himself suggested that stridulation likely plays a role in brood care,” says Conrad.

To investigate the role of acoustic communication before and during brood care, the Bayreuth researchers silenced the stridulatory apparatus of parent beetles from three Nicrophorus species by taping over them. The three species vary in their larvae’s dependency on parental care: while the larvae of one species cannot survive without parental care, those of a second species are largely independent. The third species falls somewhere in between.

The researchers found that the three species responded differently to the “silencing” of the parents, but all showed measurable negative effects. The lack of acoustic communication affected the weight of the larvae across all species, impacting their survival chances.

At first glance, the effect seems related to the dependency of the larvae, as the dependent larvae were the most affected, while the least dependent showed fewer effects. However, the timing during brood care when communication is essential also differs across species.

“Our study is an important first step in showing that stridulation during brood care in burying beetles is indeed crucial. We aim to uncover what exactly is being communicated and how brood care is coordinated in the future,” says Conrad.

AdVerts FRom HeLl

Feedback is often both baffled and intrigued by the tricks advertisers will pull to try to sell things, but the latest gambit seems designed to wrong-foot: deliberately odd capitalisation and bad grammar.

During our time spent mucking around on our smartphone, Feedback has repeatedly seen ads for a mobile game that promises the “Hardest LEvel in the HisTory”. We have SPent days tRYing to Work out wHy it looks like thaT.

The game in question is called Go Climb! It is a puzzle game in which a group of mountaineers ascending a peak have got their safety lines tangled and the player must untangle them. So it is, essentially, the back of Feedback’s TV, except it has been gamified and is also at least somewhat possible to solve.

Feedback initially wondered if this was a case of non-English-speaking developers skimping on translation costs. There is precedent for this: back in 1991, the Japanese space shooter Zero Wing was released in Europe with a notoriously shonky translation. As a result, in the introductory cutscene, an alien invader announced: “All your base are belong to us.” After this was rediscovered in the late 1990s, it became one of the most widely shared internet memes of the time.

However, a closer look at Go Climb! suggests something else is going on. It is made by a company called FOMO Games. The firm is based in Turkey, but its staff clearly have an excellent command of English, as evidenced by the information provided about all its other games, not to mention the gloriously corporate text on its website explaining that “FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out, which defines our product vision and culture.”

Instead, Feedback suspects the bad English is intentionally designed to get our attention. In line with this, the advert has other odd features that add to the off-kilter feeling. Notably, in it, the mountaineers from the game are replaced with astronauts in spacesuits drifting around against a starry backdrop, so the game’s title makes absolutely no sense. It was only when we looked at the game in an app store that the mountaineering theme was revealed and things became clear.

This seems to be a new and devilish way to advertise a product online: purposely make a complete hash of your ad and hope this intrigues people enough to get them to click through.

And on some level it worked, because here we are. But Feedback hasn’t downloaded the game. On principle, we don’t believe in rewarding deliberately bad spelling.

Monkeys in politics

At the time of writing, the US presidential election is imminent and Feedback is trapped in an endless cycle of news stories reporting polls, pundits endlessly reinterpreting said polls, and then more polls. It is a terribly long-winded way of saying “we don’t know what’s going to happen”.

Now, our colleague Alexandra Thompson has highlighted an important new contribution to the field of psephological forecasting: a paper titled “Monkeys predict US elections“.

Sadly, this doesn’t involve placing an infinite number of monkeys into voting booths. Instead, researchers showed monkeys pairs of photos of candidates from senatorial and gubernatorial elections.

The monkeys spent more time looking at the losers than at the winners. This seems like a peculiar form of torture for politicians: not only did you lose, it says, but monkeys stared at you judgmentally.

The study extended previous work showing that children can identify the winners and losers in elections based purely on photos of the candidates. Both the children and the monkeys were picking based on face shape, with square jawlines being the key sign of an improved chance of victory.

Who would do such a study? Three of the researchers are at the University of Pennsylvania, but the fourth is based at a Portuguese institution called the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown. Feedback isn’t quite sure what to make of that.

It does seem that unconscious factors play into our voting decisions. It is often claimed that taller candidates tend to win US elections, and there appears to be some truth to this.

A 2013 study pulled data on all US presidential elections to date and found that taller candidates won more of the popular vote – although this didn’t translate to them being more likely to actually be elected. In what can only be described as double nominative determinism, one of the authors is a social psychologist called Abraham Buunk.

Readers who are invested in the outcome of the US election are hereby advised: whatever you do, don’t look up Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s respective heights.

One more for the road

In such stressful times, like many people, Feedback has turned to the soothing alternative reality of The Great British Bake Off (The Great British Baking Show, if you are in North America).

There are all sorts of fascinating and delicious things to learn about the materials science of breads, cakes and biscuits, but we just want to point out that the show’s home economist, who produces all the sample biscuits, tarts and desserts for the technical challenges, is called Hattie Baker.

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When my ginger rescue cat Marmalade crawls on my lap and meows at me urgently, I often find myself wishing I really knew what was going on inside his head.

It might seem like storybook stuff, but communicating with animals may be closer than we think. Earlier this year, researchers revealed they had discovered that sperm whales in the east Caribbean use a phonetic alphabet of 143 combinations of clicks. They described it as the closest system to human language yet discovered and hope that one day they will be able to communicate with these complex, social creatures.

But it…