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Article: Look who's talking!(animal communication)(Cover Story)
- Article from:
- Science World
- Article date:
- November 2, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Scholastic, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Think you and your friends are the only ones who make a lot of noise? Animals may out-gab you any day.
Not too long ago, scientists thought of animal sounds as--well, just plain gibberish. Why all that braying, and whooping anyway? Katy Payne wanted to know. A bio-acoustician (a biologist who studies animal sounds) at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, she started to eavesdrop on animals for a living.
It's been more than 20 years since Payne first went to the Washington Park Zoo in Portland, Oregon, to listen to elephants. She spent a week listening for clues to elephant communication. She didn't hear anything special, but she did feel a "faint ...