Penguins and their noisy world.
Penguins identify their mate or chick by an acoustic signal, the display call. This identification is realized in a particularly constraining environment: the noisy world of a colony of thousands of birds. To fully understand how birds solve this problem of communication, we have done observations, acoustic analysis, propagation and playback experiments with 6 species of penguins studied in the field. According to our results, it appears that penguins use a particularly efficient "anti-confusion" and "anti-noise" coding system, allowing a quick identification and localization of individuals on the move in a noisy crowd.
Aubin
Thierry
T
NACM CNRS UMR 8620, Université Paris-Sud, Orsay Cedex, France. thierry.aubin@ibaic.u-psud.fr
D000162:Acoustics; D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D009622:Noise; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D046429:Spheniscidae / Q000502:physiology*; D014828:Vocalization, Animal / Q000502:physiology