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research contradicts the teachings of the venerable Mattel "See-and-Say." |
by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com
The bee says, "Buzz, buzz." The duck says, "Quack, quack."
Well, actually, maybe they do, and maybe they don't. Scientists have recently discovered weird zoological sounds like no human has ever before heard, calling into question the teachings of the venerable Mattel "See-and-Say." The toddlers of tomorrow may be educated with bees that quack, elephants that communicate with rumblings from their innards, and the computer-generated howl of a dinosaur.
Bio-acoustic researchers at the University of London's Queen Mary and Westfield College have measured the elusive bee quack with a special vibratometer. Professor David Pye has found that the extremely faint sound is produced only by queen bees, just as they are emerging from their larval cells. The first queen to hatch announces her birth with a piping sound. This "song" has a readily audible pitch, so bee experts have long been familiar with it. What they didn't know was that the remainder of the baby queens respond to the first-born's call with a very soft quacking noise.
If this fowl-tempered chatter is intended as praise for the hive's new matriarch, the young queen sure has an odd way of expressing regal gratitude. She tracks down the quacking hatchlings and kills them, one by one -- as she must, since the colony can only have one queen. The quacks of the acquiescing queens may be some sort of genetic suicide signal, a way of expediting the inevitable and messy coronation process. Isn't that just ducky.
American colleagues of Dr. Pye have made a comparable discovery regarding the sounds of the African elephant. Aside from their trumpeting, elephants are noted for one other noisy feature: it is widely said that you can stand beside one and hear its stomach churning. A reasonable assumption, since you'd imagine a pachyderm's gastrointestinal tract to be roughly analogous to a Maytag washer. But according to Pye and his fellow bio-acousticians, that boisterous gut-gurgling is not so much connected to digestion as it is to language.
"Elephants' parts vibrate when they are producing a vocal infrasound from within as a form of communication," Pye said. "People think they are hearing an upset stomach but it's part of a process they use to communicate with each other throughout the African bush."
Pye also explained that the vibrations can be recorded and played back at a higher speed in order for us to hear the "actual moaning noise" the elephants are making. Maybe they'll soon be out on CD in the New Age section, along with all those whale noise albums. But what do you suppose Dumbo and his buddies could be talking about? What I really hope is that scientists manage to translate these intellectual belly rumbles, and it turns out all they're saying is "Man, am I hungry."
The traditional noises of an elephant are being used as a point of comparison in still another study of animal noises. Computer scientists at the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque have been building a 3-D computer model of the skull of a parasaurolophus, an obscure dinosaur species. The primary purpose of the model is to find clues to perplexing evolutionary questions, such as whether dinosaurs were descended from birds, and if some species may have been warm-blooded.
But as an interesting side project, the researchers will use their virtual fossil to recreate the bellowing cry of the parasaurolophus. In a masterstroke cyber-feat that puts Steven Spielberg to shame, computers will simulate air currents flowing through the dinosaur's complex breathing passages, which spiral through a four-foot crest shaped like a trombone. The results will be translated into full digital audio. It will mark the first time a dinosaur has been heard in millions of years, and the sound is expected to be very dramatic, in more ways than one.
"We've got a good clue what it will sound like simply by its anatomy," said Carl Diegert, leader of the Sandia team. "It's got about nine feet of tubing which will make it sound deeper than anything we're used to hearing today. We think, though, that unlike an elephant, which can only play one note, this dinosaur was able to vary the amount of air in its tubes to change the pitch and phrase of its call."
Now that will be nice: a singing dinosaur whose harmonies exclude the refrain "I love you, you love me." All this bio-acoustic stuff is really something to crow about, and promises a roaring understanding of our animal brothers. But Dr. Doolittle's gonna have to sign up for some heavy-duty remedial courses.
Sources: The Scotsman; The Sunday Times (London); Sandia National Laboratory (http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN03-15-96/dino.html)
(c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc.
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