Sprouts
Mar. 24th, 2026 11:10 am( Read more... )



Tao Lin et al., "The audience shapes the information content of the honey bee waggle dance", PNAS 3/23/2026:
We show that the honey bee waggle dance changes depending on how many followers a dancer has and how many appropriately aged bees are available to follow it. When followers were scarce, dancers became less precise, even if the dance floor was crowded with young bees that do not follow dances. These declines in precision appear to arise because dancers search more widely for an audience, increasing their movement during the return run. The results suggest that dancers use simple social cues, such as tactile contacts, to sense follower availability. Thus, waggle dancing is not a one-way signal but a socially responsive behavior shaped by feedback from followers.
The biologists behind this paper don't reference the sociolinguistic concept of audience design — though the motivation attributed to the bees ("decline in precision […] because dancers search more widely for an audience") is a bit different from the usual list of sociolingusitic goals.
The UCSD press release of course aims at a different audience from the PNAS paper: "Bee Dancing is Better with the Right Audience", thus illustrating the point.
A bee dancing video:
For another angle on why linguists should care, see "Straw men and Bee Science", 6/4/2011.