Today is the second class in our current four class set. We will begin class with a casual conversation. Our reading material this week is about a bistro. I have included a short listening with a transcript about monkeys. The reading is your opportunity to build your vocabulary. Please underline any words that you are not familiar with. The listening is about exposure. I am not interested in accuracy. I just want you to take the time to read and listen.
Click HERE for the reading
AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
Communication is key, they say. And nowhere is that more true than in the Amazon, where thousands of animals fight for resources. In that crowded rainforest, the red-handed tamarin, a squirrel-sized monkey with brightly colored hands, relies on sound to mark its territory.
(SOUNDBITE OF RED-HANDED TAMARIN CALLING)
TAINARA SOBROZA: This is a territorial call. It's basically, this is mine.
MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Tainara Sobroza is a biologist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Brazil. She says in one corner of the Amazon, the red-handed tamarin competes with a similar species, the pied tamarin. And when they meet, it can spark vocal battles or worse.
SOBROZA: They call a lot. Sometimes, they even - they fight. And these can be very ugly fights.
CORNISH: But in studying these vocal battles, she and her colleague Pedro Pequeno have now discovered a curious phenomenon. Writing in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, they say the red-handed tamarins sometimes tweak the sound of their territorial battle cry to sound more like the pied tamarin's call. It's as if they're adopting an accent, Pequeno says.
PEDRO PEQUENO: There's a certain range of types of sounds they can produce, and they can modulate those sounds a little bit.
KELLY: Here's what the new call sounds like.
(SOUNDBITE OF RED-HANDED TAMARIN CALLING)
CORNISH: Might sound similar to our ears, but the researchers say adopting a common language of sorts may help the monkeys identify each other more easily and thus avoid conflict.
SOBROZA: If they sound the same, everybody will understand that that area is occupied.
KELLY: The pied tamarin is already critically endangered, imperiled by both the red-handed tamarin and the expansion of a nearby city. But scientists hope studying these monkey conflicts could help in the conservation of this disappearing tiny primate.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)