The Behavioral Ecology of Insect Vibrational Communication

W our reliance on vision and hearing and our weak vibration sense, humans have only recently developed ways to mine the information provided by the soundless vibration of the surfaces around us (box 1). Nevertheless, the information is there: geophones show ongoing tremors of the earth’s surface, stethoscopes bring the rhythm of our heart and lungs to a doctor’s ears, and laser vibrometers let surveillance teams listen to conversation faithfully reproduced in the vibration of a windowpane. Vibration-sensitive species, including insects and spiders, can mine this wealth of information directly. They not only monitor vibrations to detect predators or prey but also introduce vibrations into structures to communicate with other individuals. In this article we provide evidence of the importance of this form of signaling, review what we know about vibrational signaling in insects, and discuss ecological sources of selection on vibrational communication systems. Whether counted by species, family, or phylogenetic distribution, vibrational signaling is prevalent in insects (figure 1). Indeed, it is the most common form of communication among the insects that use some type of mechanical disturbance propagating through a medium; this includes airborne and underwater sound, substrate vibrations, and water surface ripples (Greenfield 2002). Of the insect families in which some or all species communicate using such mechanical channels, 80% use vibrational signals alone or in combination with other mechanical signals, and 74% use vibrational signals alone (figure 1). At the species level, we estimate that 92% of such species—over 195,000 described taxa—use vibrational communication alone or in concert with other forms of mechanical signaling, and that 71%—150,000 species—use vibrational signaling exclusively (figure 1). These estimates are probably low: many if not most insect species remain to be described, and vibrational communication is probably even more taxonomically widespread than the current literature suggests. Accompanying the high species diversity of vibrational signalers is a fantastic diversity of signals. Humans can experience these signals by broadcasting them through a loudspeaker as airborne sound, a process that leaves their pitch and timing intact. One dramatic contrast between communication systems that use substrate vibration and those that use airborne sound is immediately obvious: substrate-borne signals give the impression of being produced by a large animal. This phenomenon, often startling to those listening to vibrational signals for the first time, arises from a relaxed relationship between the size of the signaling animal and the frequency (pitch) of the signal produced. When communicating with pressure waves traveling through air, small animals cannot efficiently broadcast low-frequency signals (Bennet-Clark 1998).As a consequence, only large animals can effectively produce low-frequency sounds. However, the physical constraints responsible for this relationship do not exist for substrate vibration, and thus small species are free to