Sean Hanser

• PhD
• Supervisory Natural Resources Management Specialist at United States Navy

1. Animals produce sounds for diverse biological functions such as defending territories, attracting mates, deterring predators, navigation, finding food and maintaining contact with members of their social group. Biologists can take advantage of these acoustic behaviours to gain valuable insights into the spatial and temporal scales over which ind...

We present ongoing research in the application of information theory to animal communication systems with the goal of developing additional detectors and estimators for possible extraterrestrial intelligent signals. Regardless of the species, for intelligence (i.e., complex knowledge) to be transmitted certain rules of information theory must still...

Natural gas and methane extraction is a growing industry in Wyoming, and some greater sage-grouse leks appear to be declining in areas near industrial sites. The goal of this project is to develop a model for understanding whether industrial noise has played a significant role in these reductions in lek attendance. A software package called NMSIM,...

Until recently, few studies have used social network theory (SNT) and metrics to examine how social network structure (SNS) might influence social behavior and social dynamics in non-human animals. Here, we present an overview of why and how the social network approach might be useful for behavioral ecology. We first note four important aspects of...

No PDF available ABSTRACT Remote methods for classifying age, sex, group membership, or individual identification of animals that live in visually obscured environments are extremely valuable tools for field biologists, but reliable identification of individual callers still presents important challenges. Acoustic features of animal vocalizations c...

The humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) is an endangered species of baleen whale found throughout the world. A subset of the Polynesian population of humpbacks that migrates to Southeast Alaska participates in the group foraging activity known as "bubble-net feeding." We applied social network analysis to eight years of observations of co-occur...

This chapter provides an information theory approach, deriving entropic measures to compare adult and infant bottlenose dolphin whistle communications, and considers an “auto-correlation” application of information theory. It analyzes the Hyperspace Analog to Language (HAL) model and offers the conceptual framework behind each method, as well as pr...

Experts investigate communicative flexibility (in both form and usage of signals) as the foundation of the evolution of complex communication systems, including human language. The evolutionary roots of human communication are difficult to trace, but recent comparative research suggests that the first key step in that evolutionary history may have...

We assess the effectiveness of applying information theory to the characterization and quantification of the affects of anthropogenic vessel noise on humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) vocal behavior in and around Glacier Bay, Alaska. Vessel noise has the potential to interfere with the complex vocal behavior of these humpback whales which cou...

Information theory, as first introduced by Claude Shannon (Shannon &Weaver 1949) quantitatively evaluates the organizational complexity of communication systems. At the same time George Zipf was examining linguistic structure in a way that was mathematically similar to the components of the Shannon first-order entropy (Zipf 1949). Both Shannon's an...

The application of quantitative and comparative measures from information theory on animal communication can provide novel insights into the ecological, environmental, social, and contextual properties that shape the structure, organization, and function of signal repertoires. Using 2 phylogenetically different mammalian species that share similar...

The application of quantitative and comparative measures from information theory on animal communication can provide novel insights into the ecological, environmental, social, and contextual properties that shape the structure, organization, and function of signal repertoires. Using 2 phylogenetically different mammalian species that share similar...

Information theory allows a quantification of the complexity of a given signaling system. We are applying information theory to dolphin whistle vocalizations, humpback whale songs, squirrel monkey chuck calls, and several other animal communication systems' in order to develop a quantitative and objective way to compare inter species communication...

Innovative approaches for analyzing animal vocal communication are needed to investigate the behavioral ecology underlying the composition and structure of animal vocal communication systems. This approach will require a quantitative comparative analysis of animal vocalizations from different populations and species. To date, few studies have quant...

Information theory has been used to analyze and explore animal communication systems using two different approaches. The first approach—which is the original application outlined by Shannon and Weaver (1949)—considers the temporal distribution (i.e., probabilities of occurrence) of the components of a communication system to quantify the diversity...

Information theoretic measurements of communication repertoires quantify the organizational complexity and potential communication capacity of signaling systems with unknown structure and function. The most important advantage of measuring signaling systems quantitatively is that it allows one to examine qualitatively different communication system...

Comparative analysis of nonhuman animal communication systems and their complexity, particularly in comparison to human language, has been generally hampered by both a lack of sufficiently extensive data sets and appropriate analytic tools. Information theory measures provide an important quantitative tool for examining and comparing communication...