Alligators Sing! (But Not to Attract Mates)
Chinese alligators like a good sing-a-long, but they don't worry about carrying a tune. They also don't much care what the opposite sex thinks of the song choice, according to a story on National Geographic News.
Researchers with the Chinese Academy of Sciences ran some tests to see whether alligator "songs"--it's really more like sustained, extremely loud croaking, which the researchers compare the sound to thunder--attracted mates to the singer. Surprisingly, it didn't work quite that way.
More story and a video of singing alligators after the jump!
The researchers had expected females to draw closer to the speaker that was playing recordings of males. Surprisingly, though, males and females reacted the same way to the calls of either gender. All the alligators stayed put, and about 75 percent of the alligators joined the recorded song. This response suggests that alligators don't sing to compete for prospective mates, the study says.
And yet, the alligators do seem to sing more during mating season. So far, the best guess is that the songs are really a way of saying,"Hey, I'm an alligator, too. And I'm over here!" Which, in the context of mating, is just the time-honored tradition of hoping the opposite sex notices that you exist.
Image courtesy Flickr user wwarby, via CC.
Share this post
Read more Science Sex
Maggie Koerth-Baker
I do the Twitter, the Google+, and (to a much lesser extent) the Facebook.
Books
• Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us
Upcoming Appearances
• February 20 at British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association — Vancouver. 7:00 pm
• February 29 at University of Minnesota: Frontiers in the Environment seminar
• March 1 at Huge Theater, Minneapolis: The Theater of Public Policy
• March 12 at University of Illinois — Urbana-Champaign
• March 27 at Penn State Institutes on Energy and the Environment
• March 29-31 at York College of Pennsylvania: Writer in residence
• April 2 at MIT: The New GeekSpeak: Science Journalists' New Toolbox, with Eli Kintisch and John Bohannon — Maseeh Hall, 4:00 pm
• April 9-13 at University of Colorado, Boulder: 64th Annual Conference on World Affairs
• April 10 at Colorado State University, Fort Collins — 4:00 pm
• June 22-25 in Aspen, Colorado: Aspen Environment Forum
Where not otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution. Boing Boing is a trademark of Happy Mutants LLC in the United States and other countries.