Introduction to the special column： communication, cooperation, and cognition in predators

Communication is the glue that holds societies together and we might expect that highly social species with more to communicate about will have more complex communication systems and more complex cognitive abilities. Social species gain benefits from living in groups, and many of these benefits rely on intra-group communi- cation. For example, predator-specific alarm calls can lead to differ- ent evasion responses （Suzuki 2014）, or difficult to obtain food resources can be acquired using aggregation calls （King and Janik 2015）.