The Australian fairy wren can
master the meaning of a few key ‘words’ by listening to other species
Associated Press
Fri 3 Aug
2018 03.19 BSTLast modified on Tue 7 Aug 2018 04.53 BST
Birds can
learn a second language by listening to the tweets and chirps of other birds,
helping them to find out when a predator is approaching, scientists have found.
Wild animals are known to listen
to each other for clues about lurking predators, effectively eavesdropping on
other species’ chatter. Birds, for example, can learn to flee when neighbours
cluck the equivalent of “hawk!” — or, more precisely, emit a distress call.
The fairy wren, a small
Australian songbird, is not born knowing the “languages” of other birds. But it
can master the meaning of a few key “words”, as scientists explained in a paper
published in the journal Current Biology.
“We knew before that some animals can
translate the meanings of other species’ ‘foreign languages,’ but we did not
know how that ‘language learning’ came about,” said Andrew Radford, a biologist
at the University of Bristol and co-author of the study.
No comments:
Post a Comment