为什么驴和马的声音不同?

我们向法国雷恩大学的Alban Lemasson博士提出了这个问题……

对于这个问题，我真的不能说，因为关于马的声音交流的研究很少。我们唯一知道的是马。我们不知道骡子和驴子，或者斑马之间有什么区别。我唯一的经验是当我在田里工作的时候，我经常听斑马的叫声，听起来像是介于骡子和马之间。但我们真的不知道这需要更系统的研究。这与系统发育和解剖学有关。戴安娜:信不信由你，没有人对这些动物的声音进行过适当的比较。阿尔班认为这可能与解剖学有关。让我们来听听这些声音有什么不同，这是一匹马，一头驴，和一匹斑马，它们之间有某种相似之处，斑马和驴在叫的时候都会打嗝。现在驴和斑马被认为是近亲。 So it could be something the modern horse hasn't inherited, or they might differ because of the social organisation of their species. Horses actually have a number of different calls as Alban describes. Alban - They have a very small vocal repertoire of a few calls and one call is particularly interesting. It's the weenie call that we have studied more intensively and this is a particular call that they often produce when they are far from each other. So it's a kind of long distance contact call. So in order to be sure that this has a social function, we studied the acoustic structures of weenie calls to see if we can find acoustic differences between individuals. And we found that duration or frequency parameters change. For instance, you can have a much higher pitch voice in mares than in geldings which are also higher pitched than stallions. But it also depends on the social status of the animal because dominant stallions have a much lower pitch voice than subordinate stallions. Then finding these acoustic differences doesn't guarantee that the animals will use it, so we have conducted a playback experiment and we played the weenie calls of three social categories of horses, the familiar neighbours, familiar strangers, and group members and we found that our horses when hearing these three voices could discriminate the social category of the caller, and they adapted their behaviour response in accordance to the caller. They would be more attracted and willing to go towards the loud speaker for familiar animals, but they would be very vigilant and careful when hearing unfamiliar animals. So that gives us the conclusion that we found acoustic differences between individuals and these acoustic differences can be used by animals and decoded by animals. Diana - So if a horse has developed different calls for social encounters, perhaps the divergence in their societies has caused a divergence in their noises. We had one listener, Siobhan in Ireland, he wrote in to tell us about the breeding program in Russia to domesticate silver foxes. One of the notable developments was that they began to bark, they began to wine and they developed a more diverse range of vocal communication. So, if we domesticate horses and donkeys on the basis of their ability to communicate just a bit with us, perhaps that's caused a change in their voices too. If anyone out there has cleaned out a stable, they'll know all about the smell of urine. But what if it smells of your last meal?