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An alligator with a helium voice brought researchers from the University of Vienna one of the lg Nobel prizes this year: scientists from the Department of Cognitive Biology received the award for a work published in 2015, with which they demonstrated that the sounds of the reptiles also contain resonances. To do this, they made a Chinese alligator inhale a mixture of helium and oxygen.
The Ig Nobel Prize (Ig stands for the ignoble English word, “unworthy, shameful, shameful”), is sometimes referred to as the anti-Nobel Prize. But it is not a purely satirical award. The American magazine “Annals of Improbable Research” awards him for honoring scientific achievements that “first make people laugh, then think”.
Stephan Reber, Judith Janisch and Tecumseh Fitch, all at the University of Vienna at the time, had published their work with colleagues in the “Journal of Experimental Biology.” The Swiss biologist Reber, who conducted the study as part of her PhD at Fitch, is now at Lund University in Sweden, Janisch is currently doing her PhD at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Comparative Behavioral Research at the University of Veterinary Medicine. from Vienna. Fitch remains a professor at the University of Vienna, specializing in the research of acoustic communication in vertebrates.
“We were all very excited, it’s a great feeling,” Janisch told the APA. Because of the crown, the Ig Nobel prizes could only be seen on the Internet this year, “but at least we all got to participate, it wouldn’t have been so easy to get everyone to Harvard by plane.” A total of ten studies, which “aim to make you laugh and then think”, received “Ig Nobel Prizes”.
Investigation of reptilian sounds
The study was conducted at the St. Augustine alligator farm. “We did different projects there for three months,” Janisch recalls at this “special moment.” One of them addressed the question of whether reptilian sounds also use resonances in the vocal tract to generate sounds, just as we humans or birds do. The calls of alligators, the so-called “bellows,” are “extremely loud, incredibly deep and cut right through their core,” Reber once told the APA in connection with another study.
By allowing a Chinese alligator, which was known to scream a lot when it heard the calls of its fellows, to inhale a helium / oxygen mixture (heliox) in a glass box, the scientists were able to show that its calls were made under helium. -The influence changed and they contained resonances. They took advantage of the effect that makes the human voice sound like Mickey Mouse when you inhale helium. This is because the sound moving through the mouth becomes much faster in helium, which is less dense than the surrounding air and therefore sounds louder.
In a later study, Reber and Fitch showed that alligators use their “bellows” to communicate their height to females and competitors. Since birds and crocodiles share a common ancestor with dinosaurs, the scientists conclude that dinosaurs likely used resonances to communicate as well.
Previous award for Elisabeth Oberzaucher
In 2015 the University of Vienna received an “Ig Nobel Prize” in mathematics: Elisabeth Oberzaucher from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Vienna received the award together with her colleague Karl Grammer for their mathematical model, which they used to analyze whether or not in what conditions the Moroccan ruler Moulay Ismael (1634-1727), known as the “bloodthirsty”, fathered 888 children, as is said in tradition and is noted in the Guinness Book of Records. Oberzaucher had collected the award himself at the time. (apa)
