Separating noise and function in systems of animal communication: a comparative study of aggressive signaling in crayfish

A primary issue in the study of dishonest signaling is the researchers ability to detect and describe a signal as being dishonest. However, by understanding the relative honesty of a signal as a statistical property of an individual or population, researchers have recently quantitively describe dishonest communication. Thus, dishonesty signals can be understood as when there is a breakdown in the correlation between a signal and its underlying meaning; creating variation within a signaling system. However, such variation in signaling systems may not be attributed to dishonesty, because of inherent noise within biological systems driven by evolutionary or physiological noise. Here, we try to separate out functional variation within honest or dishonesty signaling systems from inherent biological noise by leveraging homologous structures that have evolved for separate functions - the enlarged claws of freshwater crayfish. Because burrowing species of freshwater crayfish claws have not evolved as signals, the variability in the size and strength of their claws should be minimal when compared to claws of non-burrowing species that evolved as signals during aggression. We found that despite the claws of burrowing and nonburrowing crayfish claws having evolved to serve difference functions, the claws of all species in our study were inherently noisy. Furthermore, although claws that unreliably correlate to the strengthen the wielder may function as dishonest signals in other crustaceans, we did not find support for this hypothesis; because crayfish escalated aggression based on relative body size.