With the help of her adviser, reproductive biologist Joseph C. The infrasound turned out to be coming from Monica’s neighbor, a male white rhino named Rufus. Analyzing the recording, she found that the frequency pattern was unusual for an elephant. Indeed, Von Muggenthaler was at the Virginia Zoological Park trying to tape an African elephant named Monica when she lucked onto her infravocal rhino. Until Von Muggenthaler, an undergraduate at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, taped her first rhino in 1990, only blue whales, elephants, and alligators were known to produce infrasonic calls. In the biological world, however, the ability to produce or perceive infrasound has been considered a rarity. (Of course, these phenomena produce audible frequencies too.) Unbeknownst to us, the physical world throbs with infrasonic noise, a symphony of deep booms produced by thunder, air turbulence, jet engines, volcanoes, earthquakes, crashing ocean waves, and even shuddering buildings. Frequencies lower than that are called infrasound. The most acute human ear can perceive frequencies as low as 20 hertz. She watched the fluttering needle on her tape recorder, which was hooked up to a microphone in Ipuh’s stall, and she suspected the rhino was rumbling-but in a basso so profundo as to be below the hearing range of human eavesdroppers. But animal behaviorist Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, crouching among buckets and hay bales in an adjoining storeroom, was not deceived. Ipuh was munching abstractedly on ficus leaves and looking bored. Through a window in her indoor enclosure she occasionally rubbed noses with Ipuh, a newly arrived male from Indonesia. One day last year at the San Diego Zoo, a female Sumatran rhinoceros named Barakas was singing a mournful, whalelike song punctuated with grunts and moans.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |