Urbanization of animal habitats has the potential to affect the natural communication systems of any species able tosurvive in the changed environment. Urban animals such as squirrels use multiple signal channels to communicate, but it is unknownhow urbanization has affected these behaviors. Multimodal communication, involving more than one sensory modality,can be studied by use of biomimetic mechanical animal models that are designed to simulate the multimodal signals and be presentedto animal subjects in the field. In this way the responses to the various signal components can be compared and contrastedto determine whether the multimodal signal is made up of redundant or nonredundant components. In this study, we presentedwild gray squirrels in relatively urban and relatively rural habitats in Western Massachusetts with a biomimetic squirrel modelthat produced tail flags and alarm barks in a variety of combinations. We found that the squirrels responded to each unimodalcomponent on its own, the bark and tail flag, but they responded most to the complete multimodal signal, containing both theacoustic and the moving visual components, providing evidence that in this context the signal components are redundant and thattheir combination elicits multimodal enhancement. We expanded on the results of Partan et al. (2009) by providing data on signalingbehavior in the presence and absence of conspecifics, suggesting that alarm signaling is more likely if conspecifics arepresent. We found that the squirrels were more active in the urban habitats and that they responded more to tail flagging in theurban habitats as compared to the rural ones, suggesting the interesting possibility of a multimodal shift from reliance on audio tovisual signals in noisier more crowded urban habitats [Current Zoology 56 (3): 313-326, 2010].
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