Using the ideas of the information theory to study communication systems of social animals

The question of the existence of a developed natural language in social animals is still open for discussion. We have suggested a different approach to the study of communication systems based on the ideas of information theory. Our recent experiments allowed us to evidence the presence of a potentially unlimited number of messages in ant “language”, and to show ants as being able to use the “text” regularities for information compression. In this report we consider plasticity of ant language as well as their numerical competence