About this Research Topic

Background

Animal use signals and cues to derive information about their environment, including the presence of food, enemies, and mates, the location of nesting and provisioning sites, and the assessment of reproductive and social partners. The nature and reception of signals and cues is therefore a key focus of evolutionary and behavioral ecology, and there is an ongoing lively interest in this topic, fueled by the considerable conceptual and technical developments over the last four decades. Nevertheless, our current understanding of the function and efficacy of animal signaling remains largely shaped by a focus on stationary animals in a typically static background. Yet, this rarely reflects the natural world: most animals are mobile in their search for food and mates, and their surrounding environment is usually dynamic.

There is considerable variation in the nature of animal signals within different signal modalities: color patterns of visual signals; odor cocktails of chemical signals; and amplitude and frequency of acoustic signals. This Research Topic asks how the efficacy with which these signals convey information to the intended or unintended receiver is affected by both animal movement and a potentially dynamic background. For example, there is emerging interest in how individual motion can reveal information about the signaler to the receiver but can also be a means of concealing visual cues to unintended receivers. In contrast, the impact of movement when signaling in acoustic or olfactory modalities has received little, if any, attention. The primary intention of this Research Topic is to draw attention to the importance of motion in animal signaling. Contributing authors, researching diverse organisms with different behaviors, signaling modalities, and background environments, will evaluate how motion is linked to signaling and how signalers and background movement may affect signal reception.

Our current understanding of the function and efficacy of animal signaling remains largely shaped by a focus on stationary animals in a typically static background. Yet, this rarely reflects the natural world: most animals are mobile in their search for food and mates, and their surrounding environment is usually dynamic. There is emerging interest in the impact of movement on the perception of visual signals and cues, but few if any studies of other sensory modalities.

This Research Topic aims to draw attention to the impact of movement in the perception of animal signals and cues, across the range of sensory modalities. Themes of interest include but are not limited to:

1) signaling and signaler movement
2) motion camouflage and masquerade
3) signal attenuation and background movement
4) movement and perception of signals and cues
5) movement and receiver adaptations.

We welcome manuscripts that describe both conceptual, theoretical, methodological and empirical issues, across diverse organisms with different behaviors, signal modalities, and habitats.

Keywords: motion, signal, camouflage

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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