Small Furry Hyrax Sings in Regional Dialects
18th April 2012
Hyraxes, which resemble rodents but are more closely related to elephants or manatees, often cluck, snort, squeak, tweet and wail songs from the perches of their rocky colonies.
By recording hundreds of the animals’ songs and applying clever mathematics, researchers discovered that differences in note arrangement, or syntax, in hyrax songs vary as the distance increases between colonies — a surprising occurrence of dialect.
Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.