“What do a whale and a frog have in common? According to a study published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, pound for pound, they sound the same. Sounds fishy? I mean, if you’ve ever heard the eerie song of the humpback whale, you know that it don’t sound like no spring peeper.
But scientists at the University of Florida Health Science Center have compared the calls made by 500 different animals, from crickets to crocodiles, and ostriches to chimps. And they find that the basic features of every animal’s cry, such as frequency and duration, depend on the creature’s metabolism. Which, in turn, depends on the animal’s size and body temperature.
And when the calls are adjusted to account for differences in body size and temperature, a whale sounds a lot like a frog. And vice versa for a whale-sized frog.
They think there’s a metabolic link, because energy use affects the nerves and muscles that animals use to sound off. ‘Course we still don’t know what they’re saying. And I’m not getting close enough to ask.”
The above text is an exact transcript of a podcast you can listen to at Scientific American
Interesting, it could mean that intraspecies communication hasn’t evolved in millions of years whereas theIr body and metabolism has. if all animals make similar calls then they have more or less stumbled upon the Rosetta stone of animal communication
Make Doctor Doolittle’s job easier if they’re all saying the same thing, eh?
This sounds suspiciously like science taking advantage of something really silly to postulate something even sillier, like “it gets darker when you close your eyes so blinking saves electricity”.
Who says it sound same?! Simples!