Animals take turns when communicating and wait their turn, just like most (polite) humans do

It seems some animals may have better manners than some humans. Two-way conversations - once thought to be a trait unique to our species - are common across the animal kingdom. From the whistles of dolphins to the low rumbling of elephants, creatures take turns to'talk' to each other, according to a new study. Animals communicate in a variety of ways, with verbal'talking' among them. Researchers from the Universities of York and Sheffield, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, set out to understand how common this phenomenon was in the animal kingdom.