Abstract
The common cuttlefish (Sepia officinalis) communicates and camouflages itself by changing its skin colour and texture. Hanlon and Messenger (1988 Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 320, 437-487) classified these visual displays, recognizing 13 distinct body patterns. Although this conclusion is based on extensive observations, a quantitative method for analysing complex patterning has obvious advantages. We formally define a body pattern in terms of the probabilities that various skin features are expressed, and use Bayesian statistical methods to estimate the number of distinct body patterns and their visual characteristics. For the dataset of cuttlefish coloration patterns recorded in our laboratory, this statistical method identifies 12-14 different patterns, a number consistent with the 13 found by Hanlon and Messenger. If used for signalling these would give a channel capacity of 3.4 bits per pattern. Bayesian generative models might be useful for objectively describing the structure in other complex biological signalling systems.
Full Text
The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (422.7 KB).
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Little P. Genome analysis. Nature. 1996 Aug 1;382(6590):408–408. doi: 10.1038/382408a0. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- McCOWAN B, Hanser SF, Doyle LR. Quantitative tools for comparing animal communication systems: information theory applied to bottlenose dolphin whistle repertoires. Anim Behav. 1999 Feb;57(2):409–419. doi: 10.1006/anbe.1998.1000. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Noll A. M. Cepstrum pitch determination. J Acoust Soc Am. 1967 Feb;41(2):293–309. doi: 10.1121/1.1910339. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Roweis S., Ghahramani Z. A unifying review of linear gaussian models. Neural Comput. 1999 Feb 15;11(2):305–345. doi: 10.1162/089976699300016674. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]