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This profound puzzle challenged a global research team to record
an alligator bellowing with normal air, and then breathing
heliox, a helium-oxygen mixture.
The breakthrough garnered an Ig Nobel Prize for Acoustics on
Thursday. The Ig Noble Prizes are an annual honor for
accomplishments in science and humanities that are intended to
make you laugh - then think.
"Our question was whether alligators have vocal tract resonances
like human speech," said biologist Tecumseh Fitch, a member of
the research team, who came from Austria, Sweden, Japan, the
United States and Switzerland. "The hard part is getting an
alligator to breathe helium."
That was solved by getting a female Chinese alligator into an
airtight chamber and pumping in helium, which makes sound travel
faster.
Alligators bellow a lot during mating season, possibly as a way
to signal body size and mojo, the researchers said. By raising
the vocal frequency, helium made the reptile sound less of a
hunk.
"Crocodilian vocalizations could thus provide an acoustic
indication of body size," said the winning research paper,
originally published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
The alligator on helium did not squeak, but let out a belch.
(Reporting by Reuters TV; Writing by Richard Chang; Editing by
Rosalba O'Brien)
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