The Author of this new volume on ant communication demonstrates that information theory is a
valuable tool for studying the natural communication of animals. To do so she pursues a
fundamentally new approach to studying animal communication and linguistic capacities on the
basis of measuring the rate of information transmission and the complexity of transmitted
messages.Animals' communication systems and cognitive abilities have long-since been a topic of
particular interest to biologists psychologists linguists and many others including
researchers in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence. The main difficulties in the
analysis of animal language have to date been predominantly methodological in nature.
Addressing this perennial problem the elaborated experimental paradigm presented here has been
applied to ants and can be extended to other social species of animals that have the need to
memorize and relay complex messages. Accordingly the method opens exciting new dimensions in
the study of natural communications in the wild.
