Practice question · Multiple choice
A food source is placed directly above a beehive, reachable only by flying straight up. What happened in von Frisch's experiments, and why does it matter?
Hints
- The dance encodes exactly two quantities: angle from vertical and duration.
- A message outside those two dimensions cannot be sent at all.
Show the answer
D. The foragers produced no dance, because the system has no dimension for vertical distance
Why
No dance at all. The system encodes direction relative to the sun and horizontal distance, and a source that is neither leaves nothing to encode. This is the cleanest demonstration of a system without productivity: not a message that comes out garbled, but one that cannot be formulated.
Practise Animal Communication
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More questions on Animal Communication
- The honeybee waggle dance shows displacement, since it refers to a place the dancer is not at.
- Which are true of vervet alarm calls as established by the playback experiments?
- Sort each observation by whether it supports a RICH interpretation of ape language studies or a SCEPTICAL one.
- How many acoustically distinct alarm calls did the vervet studies establish?
- Complete the comparison of systems.
- A communication system can show displacement without possessing productivity. What explains this divergence…
- Ape language studies are generally agreed to have demonstrated recursive, hierarchical syntax.