Compression principle and Zipf's Law of brevity in infochemical communication.

ABSTRACT: Compression has been presented as a general principle of animal communication. Zipf's Law of brevity is a manifestation of this postulate and can be generalized as the tendency of more frequent communicative elements to be shorter. Previous works supported this claim, showing evidence of Zipf's Law of brevity in animal acoustical communication and human language. However, a significant part of the communicative effort in biological systems is carried out in other transmission channels, such as those based on infochemicals. To fill this gap, we seek, for the first time, evidence of this principle in infochemical communication by analysing the statistical tendency of more frequent infochemicals to be chemically shorter and lighter. We analyse data from the largest and most comprehensive open

SUBMITTER: Hernandez-Fernandez A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9326285 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature