Talking with Animals by Charlotte Uhlenbroek, Hodder & Stoughton, £18.99, ISBN 034082123X Reviewed by John Bonner
MAKING good-looking and intelligent natural history documentaries has long been a high spot of the BBC’s television output. For two recent major series, Cousins in 1990 and this summer’s Talking with Animals, the corporation employed a presenter who also fits that description sexist as that might be. As a result, Dr Charlotte Uhlenbroek is now probably the only research biologist in the world with an unofficial website where fans breathlessly record her every thought and deed. There is even a page on another site offering saucy anagrams of her name.
But as this book of the second series clearly shows, Uhlenbroek doesn’t need to stand in front of the camera to grab an audience’s attention. In the book she expands on the programme’s theme of communications both within and between animal species. She does so with authority, wit and an infectious enthusiasm.
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TV’s Talking with Animals came in four parts, each one describing the strategies used to convey information or disinformation in a different situation: over great distances, in forests, under water and in massive groups. The signals can provide quite subtle messages about the sender’s intentions, and emotional or physiological state to potential mates, herd mates, rivals or predators. The printed format gives her space to explain in far greater detail about the role of different communication methods, primarily sound, sight and smell, but also more mysterious ones such as electrical pulses and vibration.
Uhlenbroek’s final chapter outlines the importance of learning in fine-tuning signals and the use of deceit by higher species such as chimpanzees. In describing how a subordinate male chimpanzee used fake alarm calls to distract a higher ranking male guarding a sexually receptive female, the author is writing from her own field observations. Uhlenbroek spent four years with Jane Goodall’s group at the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania studying communication in chimps.
But it is in discussing signalling in lowlier life forms that some of the more intriguing insights emerge. The TV production team was able to take advantage of technological developments to listen in on the previously inaudible conversations between insects. They used vibrometers – equipment that detects minute perturbations of a reflected laser beam – to measure the tiny vibrations generated by the abdomen of a female stink bug. This pest, which wrecks crops such as tomatoes, presses its abdomen against a leaf and sends come-hither messages to potential mates along the jungle telegraph of the plant’s stem and branches.
The book looks like standard coffee-table fodder, but it is more than just visually appealing. A surprisingly high proportion of the references cited are to studies completed in the past three years making Talking with Animals a pretty up-to-date introduction to the state of research into animal communications.