Species communication graph

Can different species understand one another? Can one ant specie understand the pheromones of another? Can a lioness understand the sounds of her prey? I believe that the answer to these questions is yes, at least in part. Most of the research on communication of animals has focused on specific species, or on whether humans can understand other species. Little was done in the sense of whether different species can understand, at least in part, communication signals of other species.

I propose a large-scale research into the communication graph of species. In "graph" I mean graph-theory, where nodes of the graph represent species and edges of the graph represent level of understanding. I hypothesize three types of edges:

The first, of genetically closely-related species, i.e. species that have diverged on one aspect but maintained the same signaling patterns. For example, perhaps different types of bees recognize the dance patterns of their generically-neighboring bees.

The second edge type is that of spatially related species, i.e. species that reside in the same habitat. Those can evolutionally benefit from understanding some aspects of communication of other species, e.g. direction to food sources.

The last edge type is that of predator-prey. I hypothesize that most (at least mammalian) predators understand to some extent the defensive communication signals of their prey. This has a clear evolutionary advantage.

The experiments to check these communication edges are obviously not simple. I can think of a naïve experiment where several types of communication signals of one species denote location of food for the second species and see whether the latter can learn or distinguish between them.

I believe this project can teach us a lot about communication in the wild, as well as more fundamental aspects of communication at large.