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As the saying goes, five miles of different sounds, ten miles of different tones, speaking dialects. Humans speak in dialects, so can animals from different regions communicate with each other?
Scientists' research on birds in the 1960s found that the basic vocabulary of different species is the same, but environmental differences can cause animals to have dialects, which is the main reason for the emergence of animal dialects. When the environment is different, animals of different populations adjust their pronunciation according to changes in the environment.
Below we will show several "dialects" of animals:
Crows that "go abroad" can understand foreign languages
Image source: pixabay
In the United States, crows can make a special call to alarm, and other crows will fly away when they hear it. However, when the recording of this cry was played against the French crows, they not only did not fly away, but gathered together or did not react at all.
Under normal circumstances, the crows that are caged in two different countries cannot understand each other's "bird language" at all, while the crows that migrate between North America and Europe can understand the cries of crows in different places, and it seems that it is really important to go abroad to learn a new language!
Japanese macaques: Soon after birth, they speak "dialects"
Image source: Wikipedia
The Japanese macaque, also known as the snow monkey, is a type of macaque that lives in northern Japan and is the northernmost non-human primate in the world.
Even if they are also Japanese macaques, if they live in different regions, they will have different calls. The team at Kyoto University in Japan found that the chi-cho monkey group had an average call frequency of 670 hertz, about 100 hertz lower than the monkey group on Yakushima Island.
In addition, the monkeys in these two places have almost no difference in pronunciation when they are just born, but after only half a year, the pronunciation of the baby monkeys begins to change and they can speak dialects.
Not only Japanese monkeys have dialects, but chinese monkeys also have them. Su Yanjie, a professor in the Department of Psychology at Peking University, began studying the vocal communications of golden snub-nosed monkeys in 2001, and she played back the sound of monkeys warnings collected in Shennongjia at shanghai zoos or Beijing zoos, and the monkeys did not react at all. After preliminary inference, Professor Su believes that the golden snub-nosed monkey may have a dialect.
If the animals in the two regions in the above example are too far apart, and two completely different "languages" may be formed, rather than "dialects", then take an example of being adjacent to the same species.
"Speaking" Beijing dialect and Henan dialect of the scorpion
The African slug is a major pest in the world, especially in the area south of the Yellow River in Henan Province. The slugs like to drill into the soil to move, biting the seedlings and shoots off to death, and the activities of the slugs will also channel the topsoil layer into many tunnels, so that the seedling roots are separated from the soil, so that the vegetable seedlings die due to water loss.
In 1989, in order to eliminate the slugs, China's entomologists experimented with a sound lure method, using a high-fidelity tape recorder, first recording the "love songs" of the male caddisflies, and then taking them to the field to play loudly, and the female caddisflies ran to the tape recorder in groups, so that people could eliminate them in one fell swoop.
As the experiment progressed further, the researchers found that they used the best acoustic signal in Beijing's Pinggu district to do acoustic lure in Zhongmu, Henan, and found that the number of insects lured was very small, but when the scientists recorded the local sound of the grasshoppers in Henan to do the lure, the lure was significantly improved.
The results of the experiment are self-evident, and the sound of the slugs is also divided into Henan accent and Beijing accent.
Here, the dialect of the slug refers to the behavioral sound signal of the slug sound communication, and the same species of slug forms its own unique population communication signal in different geographical environments. The structure of the sound communication of the slug population is not exactly the same for each geographical population, that is, even the respective "languages" of the two adjacent populations in Henan and Beijing are not exactly the same.
The chirping frequency of the moths living in Henan is 2.5Khz pulse rate 167 times/s, while the sound frequency of the Beijing moths is 1.4Khz pulse rate 77 times/s. The loud sounds that the scorpions usually emit are summoning sounds, and this sound has the ability to summon male and female individuals. It can be seen that if the Henan caddisflies want to "stir" the Beijing caddisflies, they must also learn the Beijing dialect well!
Author: Su Chengyu (Zhihu User, Excellent Answerer of Animal Science/Animal Nutrition, Popular Science Author)
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