Signaling Categories
The number of possible signals available to an animal tends to be severely limited:
Social vertebrates tend to have 30-40 displays
Social insects have 10-20 categories of signals
The meaningful linguistic units which comprise a human language far outnumber even the most
complex animal communication system.
The average English speaker has an active vocabulary of 5000 words.
The English language is estimated to have more than 70, 000 words. (Estimates like this are difficult to evaluate because the concept of word is not always consistently or carefully defined.)
The number of sentences available to a speaker is infinite.
In animals these signals are usually mediated by pheromones.
The population of a termite mound is controlled by the queen who lays more eggs for a particular social class if its numbers drop.
Information about the composition of the mound population is communicated chemically by workers who carry food to members of the mound.
As food is passed from one member to another, chemical compounds unique to that social class are also passed to food carrying workers.
The chemical cocktail which is eventually passed to the queen by the food carrying workers controls the type of eggs which she lays.