Even frogs have accents

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There are studies that make us laugh. This is his position. In Australia, researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney) and the Australian Museum have found that frogs communicate with different “accents”. Teaches us interesting engineering. To do this, nothing could be simpler: scientists collected the crocs of almost 700 frogs across Australia.

“We were surprised by the results because the link between habitat and croaking variation has a very solid theoretical foundation.“, explains Grace Gillard, lead author of the study. “The croak is important because it’s one of the most accurate ways to identify frogs, all of which have a distinctive croak. Think of it as an accent.

However, if scientists were to discover these variations, they would not know where these different pronunciations come from and specifically why they differ from one region to another. That is the most plausible hypothesis “Animals adapt their vocalizations to local conditions to improve transmission across their habitats.”

A thousand records

To reach their conclusion, the researchers relied on the call of one species in particular: the Limnotinastus dumerili, Also known as “banjo frogs” in English. ‘We found a gap in research on frogs’insists Grace Gillard. “Previous research has been conducted on a very small scale, often with less than 100 frogs per study. Therefore, the full geographic diversity of crocs could not be captured with such a small sample.

Also, Australian scientists decided to create an app for citizens to record the croaking of frogs they encountered across the country. “So we’ve got thousands of recordings. From these data, we analyzed nearly 700 crocs across an area of ​​1.7 million km2 from Tasmania to northern Queensland. The team of scientists is now expanding their research by studying different species of frogs.