Look who's talking!

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 throbbing in the air." Suddenly she recalled the deep vibrations blasted by the bass notes of her church organ back home.

Payne knew that finback whales communicate by infrasound, sounds pitched so low (less than 20 hertz, or 20 sound cycles per second) that humans feel the physical vibration like pounding bass music rather than hear the sound. So Payne returned to the zoo with a tape recorder. By playing back the infrasound within the human hearing range (20 to 20,000 Hz), Payne discovered that elephants are really deep-voiced chatterboxes. They just happen to "talk" in sounds so low humans can't hear them (see chart, p. 11). Two decades later, Payne and her colleagues have still just begun to probe the mysteries of animal language.

Researchers have a long way to go to decipher how animals think and process their own calls. And scientists like Payne are quick to point out that animal communication doesn't conform to human sentences or grammar. But she and others have uncovered evidence of complex animal thinking, social lives, and emotions. Marsh wrens sing hundreds of different songs, each with its own meaning. Whales imitate one another's voices, and may even sing in rhymes. Chimpanzees ask each other for hugs. "Scientists have always focused on what we see," Payne says. "We've finally gotten around to studying what we hear."

"We no longer think of animals standing around making funny noises," says bio-acoustician Jeff Cynx of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. "They're doing things we once thought only humans could do--making decisions and speaking with a deliberate sense of purpose. They're thinking."

Just what are animals trying to tell one another? Check it out.

Elephant ESP 

Know somebody whose voice carries a mile? Try listening to an elephant. Elephants communicate from as far as 3.2 km (2 miles) apart. Researchers had long puzzled over elephants' uncanny ability to silently locate one another across miles of forest--African guides jokingly called it "elephant ESR" While elephant talk includes growls, snorts, and trumpets, it's the rumbles undetected by the human ear that fascinated Katy Payne.

What do elephants gain by using such low-pitched banter? It's quite simple, Payne found. Sound consists of invisible pressure waves that bump into objects as they spread from their source. High-pitched sounds like whistles are muffled as they strike obstructions. But deep-rumbling elephant infrasound has an especially long wave motion (10 meters or more). Small obstacles like grass and leaves can't scatter these lengthy waves, so elephants can call and respond to one another eight times as far apart as humans. Elephants aren't the only animals to speak in super-low frequencies. Giraffes and hippos may also produce infrasound.

When it comes to elephant wails and barks, Payne and her fellow scientists have labeled more than 30 calls with distinct meanings, many uttered below our hearing range: A scared calf cries, and its mother softly soothes it. When the mother is distracted, a babysitting elephant warns rambunctious youngsters not to stray too far with a bark. Leaders urge the herd into motion with a "let's go" trumpet call. Your ears might detect only parts of these routine calls.

"If you went to a family reunion, you'd hear laughing, fighting, and crying," Payne says. "You hear much of the same among elephants."

The Dish on Koko

Last April, 15,000 computer users logged onto America Online for a live chat. The featured speaker announced that she liked apple juice and wanted a dog to play with. Not spellbinding info--until you consider the speaker is a 140-kg (308-lb) female gorilla named Koko.

The 27-year-old gorilla has been learning sign language from her adoptive mother, psychologist Penny Patterson, since she was a sickly one-year-old in the San Francisco Zoo. A chimpanzee was already learning sign language at the time, but nobody knew what a gorilla could do. Within two months, Koko could sign the words for "food," "drink," and "toothbrush," among others. Today, Koko understands some 2,000 spoken words and "speaks" with a vocabulary of 1,000 signs, according to her handlers. In an exclusive interview with the renowned gorilla, Science World asked Koko what new words she'd learned lately. Patterson translated her response: "Chocolate, browse."

Across this bridge of language Koko has shown a surprising capacity for mischief, taunts, and emotions once considered uniquely human. She spontaneously hugs her trainers, and cuddles with a pet kitten. She even watches movies.

SW: What do you wish for?

Koko: Have gorilla another have gorilla have Koko-love.

SW: Do you prefer human or gorilla friends?

Koko: Friends fine gorilla.

SW: Do your human friends love you?

Koko: People Koko-love. (Patterson points out that Koko's comments are short--only two or three words--because sign language does not lend itself to full sentences.) When trainers showed Koko potential gorilla mates on a video screen--a new type of dating service?--her reaction to suitors she liked was to plant a big smacking kiss right on the TV! "She is capable of lying, humor, and embarrassment," Patterson says.

When Koko's kitten, All Ball, was run over and killed by a car, Koko mourned for months, signing "cry, frown, sad." Soon afterward, she told her handlers she wanted to have a baby. Koko even has opinions about movies. When SW asked her to name her favorite flick, Koko pointed to her videotape of Free Willy.

Patterson's 26-year dialogue with Koko supports what other researchers now believe--that a wide range of higher mammals like apes, gorillas, and chimpanzees share some human-language skills. "The strict border between human and animal language is being erased," says Talbot J. Taylor, a linguist at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. If Koko is any proof, then animals must love to gab--in their own unique tongues, of course.

Rap Dance

If you discovered a hot new pizza hangout, you might want to pass the tip on to friends. Imagine having to give them the address by hip-hop dancing. If you were a honeybee, that's just what you'd do. Bees express precise information to each other through pure motion--what scientists call "honeybee dances."

Bee hives contain a queen and up to 50,000 workers, so exact communication is vital to avoid chaos. Searcher bees known as foragers search out flower patches that supply nectar and pollen to feed the hive. When they discover a rich site, foragers fly back to the hive and advertise the meal's exact location through body motion. If flowers are within 100 m (328 ft), the forager dances in a small circle, periodically reversing direction. The richer the feast, the wilder the dance steps.

To pinpoint faraway flowers (up to 10 km, or 6 mi), a forager prances in a figure-eight pattern known as "the waggle dance." Two or three bees at a time learn how far to fly by observing the duration of the waggle. Since bees can't see inside a pitch-black hive, they touch the dancer with their antennae.

How in the world can bees express themselves through dance? Entomologists (insect scientists) believe the forager points hive mates in the right direction via a solar compass, or orientation based on the sun. If the dance runs vertically up the honeycomb dance floor, for example, the flowers lie in the direction of the sun. Forty-five degrees to the right of vertical means 45 degrees to the right of the sun. And so on. Having received this guidance from a forager, flower-bound flyers hit their targets with 90 percent accuracy.

Entomologists hope to learn more about bees' flying habits by using radar to watch insects harnessed with tiny antennae. "Bees are smarter than we previously thought," says biologist Thomas Seeley of Cornell University.

Smart Squawkers

If you have a friend who can mimic anybody, she has nothing on a parrot. Wild parrots developed highly flexible vocal chords over thousands of years to keep tabs on the flock inside dense tropical forests. They can imitate any sound from a leaky faucet to a soprano belting opera. But do they understand what exactly they're saying?

Scientists used to assume squawking parrots amounted to no more than a circus act, animals performing dumb feats of repetition. But University of Arizona researcher Irene Pepperberg has spent the last 20 years disproving old myths about parrots. "It's as if parrot brains are IBMs and our brains are Macs," she says. "They may be organized differently, but the same information comes out."

Alex, an African gray parrot who is Pepperberg's prize student, speaks and responds to 100 words. Experiments show he can name five shapes and seven colors, and knows the difference between bigger and smaller, same and different.

"How many blue keys?" Pepperberg asks, presenting him with a tray of red and blue keys and blocks.

"One," Alex squawks correctly.

"Alex has to process an amazing amount of information to come up with the right answer," Pepperberg says. Alex learns the way young children do. He practices new words in private before using them in conversation, just like any 2-year-old child.

Most impressive of all, Alex can make his own wishes known. When he tires of Pepperberg's exercises, he says, "Wanna go away."