Animal conversations all around us, researchers find

LONDON: From elephants to frogs to fireflies, it seems everyone wants to chat.

Twoway conversations, once thought of as uniquely human, are common across the animal kingdom, say scientists.

The whistles of dolphins, low rumbling of elephants, soft chirps of naked mole rats and ‘‘rapping’’ of clawed frogs might be somewhat lost in translation. But according to a new review of scientific evidence, they all follow the turntaking rules of human conversation.

Researchers from the UK and Germany found animal communication was still not well understood, despite studies of birds dating back 50 years. Lack of data and, ironically, poor communication between scientists had hampered direct comparisons between species.

The authors of the new study highlighted timing as a key feature of communicative turntaking in both humans and animals. Some species were impatient chatterers, certain songbirds waiting less than 50 milliseconds to ‘‘reply’’ during a conversation. At the other end of the scale, sperm whales exchanged clicks with a gap of about two seconds between turns. Humans lay somewhere in between, typically pausing for about 200 milliseconds before responding.

And humans were not the only species that consider it rude to interrupt. Both blackcapped chickadees and European starlings practised ‘‘overlap avoidance’’ during turntaking communication.

‘‘If overlap occurs, individuals became silent or flew away, suggesting that overlapping may be treated, in this species, as a violation of socially accepted rules of turntaking,’’ the researchers wrote in the journal Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

The team has proposed a new framework for animal research highlighting some essential elements of human conversation.