Squeak worth a squeeze

02 April 2015 - 03:12 By Reuters

Male mice use ultrasonic "love songs" to woo females, using different tunes for those they can see and for those they can only smell. Jonathan Chabout - a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina - said the mouse songs are a sequence of utterances, or syllables, strung together, at times with a tempo."These songs are really high in pitch, above 50kHz, and are not audible to humans. When we pitch them down and play them back at real speed they sound like birds."The researchers noted that male mice sang more complex and louder songs when they were able to smell the urine of a female mouse but not actually see that potential mate. With the female present, the males changed their tune, singing longer, simpler songs.The simpler song allows the male mouse to conserve energy for the act of mating...

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