Identifying Hyenas By Their Giggle
Sunday, April 26, 2009 - 09:14
in Psychology & Sociology
To human ears, the laughs of individual hyenas in a pack all sound the same: high-pitched and staccato, eerie and maniacal. But every hyena makes a different call that encodes information about its age and status in the pack, according to behavioral neurologists. They have developed a way to identify a hyena by picking out specific features of its giggle.