IMAGINE trying to hear your mother’s voice in a crowd of a million shouting people. This is the task facing king penguin chicks. But mum’s calls are cleverly designed to help junior.
Adult king penguins make a series of four to eight calls, which each go from loud to soft and are composed of numerous harmonics. Previous tests have suggested that the chicks don’t need the loud-soft component or the harmonics to recognise their mother’s calls. So why the complexity?
Thierry Aubin at Paris South University and Pierre Jouventin at the Functional and Evolutionary Ecology Centre in Montpellier tested chicks…
