It turns out honey bees are a lot like people: they put on a better show when they know someone is watching.

A new study published in PNAS reveals that the honey bee waggle dance, one of the most famous examples of animal communication, is not a one-way broadcast but a dynamic, two-way interaction. The information encoded in the dance is shaped by the audience, challenging the traditional view that information flows unidirectionally from dancers to passive followers.

Researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their collaborators provided the first organ-level evidence that lianas and trees employ fundamentally different hydraulic strategies in their flowers. The study offered a key explanation for the increasing dominance of lianas in seasonally dry tropical forests under climate change.