14 DAY TRIAL // In what might be the most shocking revelation of the year, a team of researchers found that giraffes aren't the silent creatures we think them to be. They do talk, it's just that, so far, we failed to notice their jibber-jabber.
In a study in the journal BMC Research Notes, scientist Angela Stoeger at the University of Vienna and her team explain how, having listened to audio recordings of giraffes living at zoos across Europe, they found that, during nighttime, the animals hum.
These vocalizations that giraffes produce under the cover of darkness are low frequency, and so, until this investigation, they pretty much went unnoticed. But the animals do produce them, quite possibly in an attempt to communicate.
“Besides the known burst, snorts and grunts, we detected harmonic, sustained and frequency-modulated ‘humming’ vocalizations during night recordings,” specialist Angela Stoeger and her colleagues write in their report in the journal BMC Research Notes.
“These results show that giraffes do produce vocalizations, which, based on their acoustic structure, might have the potential to function as communicative signals to convey information about the physical and motivational attributes of the caller,” the scientists further detail.
Like many other species, giraffes live in groups. Being social creatures, they must have evolved to exchange information one way or another. Otherwise, they would not be able to navigate their society.
As it turns out, it might very well be that, like plenty of other animals that don't live alone but as part of an extended group, they rely on vocalizations to communicate and keep tabs on one another.
Over the years, wildlife researchers have heard giraffes producing bursts, snorts and grunts. Until this investigation carried out by Angela Stoeger and her team, however, nobody had ever documented sustained and frequency-modulated sounds that could be vocalizations.