History of animal bioacoustics

Abstract

The earliest studies on animal bioacoustics dealt largely with descriptions of sounds. Only later did they address issues of detection, discrimination, and categorization of complex communication sounds. This literature grew substantially over the last century. Using the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America as an example, the number of papers that fall broadly within the realm of animal sound production, communication, and hearing rose from two in the partial first decade of the journal in the 1930’s, to 20 in the 1970’s, to 92 in the first 2 years of this millennium. During this time there has been a great increase in the diversity of species studied, the sophistication of the methods used, and the complexity of the questions addressed. As an example, the first papers in JASA focused on a guinea pig and a bird. In contrast, since the year 2000 studies are often highly comparative and include fish, birds, dolphins, dogs, ants, crickets, and snapping shrimp. This paper on the history of animal bioacoustics will consider trends in work over the decades and discuss the formative work of a number of investigators who have spurred the field by making critical theoretical and experimental observations.