March 05, 2004

Birds recognise Monkey warning calls. Eggheads claim jungle birds are able to distinguish certain freaked-out monkey shrieks from other freaked-out monkey shrieks, determining which are useful to them. Babelfish not involved.
posted by Nostrildamus 20 years ago
  • What do birds care if they can fly? If I was a bird I'd just laugh at the stupid monkeys and watch the show as some jaguar eats mommymonkey.
  • I remember seeing something about this on David Attenborough. Basicaly, he put a stuffed cheetah dummy in the middle of the jungle, slid it out from behind a tree and the birds started making the "danger" signal. Then the monkeys went nuts. When he hid the dummy, the birds gave an "all clear" signal and the monkeys started calming down. Apparently the warning signal changed depending on whether the threat was coming from the ground or the sky.
  • Vervet monkeys (related to Diana monkeys, I think?) have three different calls, one for 'eagle', one for 'leopard', and one for 'snake'. You can hear them here.
  • personally, i'm just glad that my dogs don't listen to my parrot. he's the most intuitive one to pick up signs that i'm getting ready to go out and starts calling 'bye-bye,dearie' all the time. the dogs don't clue in until they see me put on shoes and/or get my bag ready...so i leave those tasks until the end. the dogs, however, do respond to the parrot's emergency squawks! never underestimate those birds!
  • >>Diana monkeys are a brightly coloured, extremely observant species obviously the princess' namesake!
  • I remember seeing something about that years ago. Monkeys also have warning calls to each other. What this study group did was record noises from different birds and monkeys (and a couple other animals I can't remember) and the monkeys would have a certain response to different sounds.
  • shrieks is all? what about gibbering?
  • damn. i mean, gibbering.
  • I love that caption.