Episode 303: Weird and Mysterious Animal Sounds
b"Thanks to Emory for suggesting this week's topic, mysterious animal sounds!\\n\\nFurther reading/watching:\\n\\nThe Story of Elk in the Great Smoky Mountains\\n\\nTerrifying Sounds in the Forests of the Great Smoky Mountains\\n\\nEvidence found of stingrays making noise\\n\\nThis New AI Can Detect the Calls of Animals Swimming in an Ocean of Noise\\n\\nThe wapiti [pic from article linked above]:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe stingray filmed making noise [stills from video linked to above]:\\n\\n \\n\\nThe tawny owl makes some weird sounds:\\n\\n\\n\\nThe fox says all kinds of things:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\n\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\n\\nEmory suggested we do a new episode about strange and mysterious animal sounds a while back, which is one of my favorite topics. The problem is, it\\u2019s hard to find good audio clips to share. It\\u2019s taken me a while, but I think I\\u2019ve found some good ones.\\n\\nIn late September 2018, in the Great Smoky Mountains in North Carolina, some hikers recorded a terrifying animal sound. The sound wasn\\u2019t a mystery for long, though, because they soon saw the animal making it. Here\\u2019s what it sounded like:\\n\\n[elk bugle]\\n\\nIt\\u2019s the bugle of a male elk, which I\\u2019m going to call wapiti to avoid confusion. It\\u2019s a sound that wasn\\u2019t heard in the Smoky Mountains for at least a century. The eastern wapiti was once common throughout eastern North America but was driven to extinction in the late 19th century, although the last wapiti in North Carolina was killed almost a century earlier than that. All North American wapiti almost went extinct by about 1900, and hunters and conservationists worked to get nature preserves set aside to save it and its habitat. Starting in the 1990s, wapiti from western North American subspecies were reintroduced in the southeast, with reintroductions in the Smokies starting in 2001. There are now at least 200 wapiti living in the mountains, probably more. I\\u2019ve seen them myself and they\\u2019re beautiful animals!\\n\\nThe wapiti is a type of deer. We talked about it way back in episode 30 along with the moose. Various species of wapiti live throughout Europe and Asia as well as North America, although it\\u2019s been hunted to extinction in many areas. As we mentioned in episode 30, the name elk is used for the moose in parts of Europe, which causes a lot of confusion, which is why I\\u2019ve chosen to call it by its Algonquin name of wapiti.\\n\\nThe wapiti is a really big animal, one of the biggest deer alive today. Only the moose is bigger. It\\u2019s closely related to the red deer of Eurasia but is bigger. A male, called a bull, can stand about 5 feet tall at the shoulder, or 1.5 meters, with an antler spread some four feet wide, or 1.2 meters. Females, called cows, are smaller and don\\u2019t grow antlers. Males grow a new set of antlers every year, which they use to wrestle other males in fall during mating season. At the end of mating season the wapiti sheds its antlers.\\n\\nThe bugling sound males make during mating season is extremely loud. The sound tells females that the bull is strong and healthy, and it tells other bulls not to mess with it.\\n\\n[elk bugle]\\n\\nOur next sound is from an animal that scientists didn\\u2019t realize could even make sounds. There\\u2019ve been reports for a long time of stingrays making clicking noises when they were alarmed or distressed, but it hadn\\u2019t been documented by experts. A team of scientists recently decided to investigate, with their report released in July of 2022. They filmed stingrays of two different species off the coasts of Indonesia and Australia making clicking sounds as divers approached. They think it may be a sound warning the diver not to get too close. This is what it sounds like:\\n\\n[Stingray making clicking sounds]\\n\\nOne exciting new technological development is being used to detect underwater sounds and hopefully help identify them. It\\u2019s called DeepSqueak, because it was originally developed to record ultrasonic calls made by mice and rats."