Scientists studying Chinese Alligators, one of the world's most vocal crocodillians, hypothesize that the gators are singing to form singles' clubs. At first, scientist Xianyan Wang and his partners assumed that the male gator's songs were used as a way to attract females, which is the case in most animal songs. To test this theory, Wang and colleagues designed and carried out a playback experiment in which they recorded the songs of the male gators and played them back to captive gators (both male and female), one by one in a special "testing arena" in the Anhui Research Center for Chinese Alligator Reproduction, a semi-wild sanctuary and research facility for this extremely endangered species.
Instead of the females drawing closer in reaction to the recorded male's song, as they expected, both females and males reacted in the same way: they stayed put and about 75% of them joined in the song, and both genders reacted the same way to recorded songs of both genders. These results suggest that these alligators are not singing to attract a mate.
But then, Wang and his colleagues asked, does the singing increase during mating season? Clearly having something to do with sex, Yang theorizes that the singing is a way to detect other "singles" in the gator's area so that they can form mating groups for the breeding season. Wang's next step to confirm his theory is to test alligators in the wild, and to test singing outside the mating season when the songs are about something other than sex.
-Posted By: Kristen "Kristy" McDermott
This article is very interesting. I didn't even know that they made these vocalizations. Did they try do this playback experiment just in front of males to see what happens? I wonder if females have to be around in order for males to sing a long in the song? How many species of them do this?
ReplyDelete-Samantha Babcock
I wonder what an alligator song sounds like. Must be an interesting sound to hear. Do all alligators sing or just certain species? Have they looked at the songs in a program like Raven? Great find!
ReplyDelete-Tricia Carlson
Cool article Kristy. You would think in this day and age we could just hook these crocs up with a reptile-style match.com. Nothing wrong with a little internet dating. Well, as long as we breed them and get their numbers up, I'm happy. I have would never have imagined males crocs interacting in such a manner. I like hearing about studies that elevate the connotative status of reptiles. Thank you for your post.
ReplyDeleteposted by: Jess Bouchard (1)
This is really cool -- I had no idea alligators could "sing". Do any mated alligators sing, or is it just the singles?
ReplyDeletePosted by Heather Gore