Madlen Ziege - Nature Is Never Silent: How Animals and Plants Communicate with Each Other

Nature Is Never Silent

Madlen Ziege studied biology in Potsdam, Berlin, and Australia. For her doctorate at Goethe University in Frankfurt, she studied the communicational behaviour of wild rabbits in urban and rural areas. She works as a behavioural biologist at the University of Potsdam and inspires a love of scientific research in people of all ages with her science slams.

Alexandra Roesch is a bicultural, bilingual freelance translator of fiction and nonfiction, based in Frankfurt, Germany. She has an MA in translation from the University of Bristol, and was longlisted for the 2018 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translators Prize.

Scribe Publications
1820 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia
2 John Street, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom
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First published in German as Kein Schweigen im Walde: Wie Tiere und Pflanzen miteinander kommunizieren by Piper 2020
Published in English by Scribe 2021

2020 Piper Verlag GmbH, Mnchen/Berlin.
English language translation copyright Alexandra Roesch 2021

With 33 illustrations by the author.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted.

Scribe acknowledges Australias First Nations peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this country, and we pay our respects to their elders, past and present.

978 1 922310 13 2 (Australian edition)
978 1 913348 24 3 (UK edition)
978 1 950354 81 8 (US edition)
978 1 922586 04 9 (ebook)

Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

scribepublications.com.au
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Contents

Every living organism communicates

Why do we need this book?

Lifes to-do list

A world of information

PART I

How is information exchanged?

Everything is so nice and colourful here

Natures orchestra

The world of smells

No information without receptors

Heres looking at you, kid

Listen and be amazed

Follow your sense of smell

PART II

Who exchanges information with whom and why?

Eating and being eaten

Says one bacterium to another

Order a bite!

Plants la carte

Sex or no sex

Lovely neighbours

A matter of life and death

Coming, ready or not

Lets get it on?

Two, three, many communication in groups

PART III

What if everything changes?

Rabbits at home in the city

And the moral of the story?

Introduction

Every living organism communicates

Who have you communicated with so far today? With your partner, your pet, or your plant? And while we are on the subject: how and why did you communicate? The psychotherapist and communications expert Paul Watzlawick hit the nail on the head when he said: You cant not communicate. So its no wonder that we are constantly exchanging information with other people within our family, with friends, and with colleagues. But what about all the other living organisms on our planet? Does Paul Watzlawicks you also apply to animals, plants, and bacteria can these also not not communicate? This book is about something called biocommunication. Every living thing actively sends and receives information and is therefore able to communicate! So bio, from the Greek root word /bos , simply means life. Communication, from the Latin word commnicti , means to share. Bio fits communication perfectly because life needs to send and receive messages to live. And so even the living organisms in the stillest forest, from the smallest fungus right up to the biggest tree, have quite a bit to say to each other. Those who think the forest is silent just havent listened properly yet. Nature is never silent.

Why do we need this book?

NATURE IS AMAZING

My enthusiasm for biocommunication began in the woods, meadows, and waters of my hometown in the German state of Brandenburg. Here, everything around me chirps, moos, or cackles, and I trained myself early on to communicate with my fellow living organisms. The many fairytales, myths, and legends in my favourite books proved to be true: here, people could talk to animals and plants; here, the wisdom of nature could help little heroes such as myself out of any hopeless situation. Today, I know that in earlier cultures the Celts, for example it was perfectly natural to communicate with nature. To this day, some inhabitants of Iceland and Ireland still ask Mother Nature for permission when new building projects are pending. The indigenous Ainu people on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japans main islands, also regularly speak to animals and plants, to strengthen their own connection to nature. Why would people seek to have a conversation with nature if they werent expecting an answer?

WHAT DO FISH HAVE TO SAY TO EACH OTHER?

I studied biology at the University of Potsdam and quickly worked out what I wanted to do with my life I wanted to become a behavioural biologist. I wanted to learn everything about why animals behave the way they do and, most importantly, how and why they interact with each other. I was especially interested in cats, and so it was my goal to investigate the communication behaviour of these mysterious animals. As so often happens in life, things turned out a little differently than I expected, and I ended up in Mexico during my final thesis with no cats at all. My first research project was on fish. I was not particularly happy with this development in my career as a behavioural scientist because, in my opinion, fish were not exactly the most exciting research subjects in terms of communications. However, my fish were different!

The Atlantic carp, Poecilia mexicana , and the Grijalva mosquitofish, Heterophallus milleri , belong to the fish family of livebearers, whose members lead a dissolute sex life. Most fish dont really have much to do with the opposite sex, because they practise external fertilisation: the female lays the eggs, the male swims over them, the deed is done! Live-bearing fish like the Atlantic carp or the Grijalva mosquitofish, on the other hand, have internal fertilisation. Here, the sperm of the male must somehow enter the body of the female to fuse there with the egg. Clearly, this form of fertilisation involves much more communication between the sexes! As if the dialogue between males and females is not already challenging enough, shoal-living fish are part of a large communication network. This means that male and female fish are rarely alone in order to communicate with each other without being disturbed. The information the two lovers send each other can also be picked up by others in the shoal, and there is always the odd voyeur or two or rather, eavesdroppers. It was precisely these love triangles within communication that I was interested in for my diploma thesis. I conducted behavioural experiments: for example, to find out if males behave the same way if there is another male present or not. Are they interested in the same females, or do they change their flirting strategy? Youll find the answer to that question in this book!