It’s not every morning that you get the opportunity to witness a triple lunar coincidence in the pre-dawn skies before you’ve even brewed your coffee. But on Wednesday morning in the United States, early morning skygazers were treated to what the internet has dubbed a "super blue blood moon." A BLUE moon happens when there are two full moons within a single calendar month. A supermoon occurs when the moon orbits closer to planet Earth than usual. There was a supermoon on Jan. 1 to start off the year. That’s how we get a “SUPER blue moon.” During a lunar eclipse, Earth passes between the moon and the sun, and the planet casts its shadow over its lunar satellite. It’s nothing like the spectacle of a total solar eclipse, but the red tinge the moon takes on is striking. And it gives us the “super blue BLOOD moon.”
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scientists report that a 16-year-old orca named Wikie was able to copy a variety of new sounds on command. The study joins a growing body of research illustrating the deep importance of social learning for killer whales. In the wild, killer whales live in tight-knit, matriarchal pods with unique vocal traditions. For decades, scientists have suspected that orcas acquire these dialects through social learning rather than genetic inheritance. Observations of captive killer whales making new calls when moved to a different social setting, or even mimicking the whistles and clicks of dolphins and the barks of sea lions, suggested that might be the case. This study takes it a step further, providing “gold-standard, controlled experimental evidence” that orcas can learn fresh sounds through imitation.
The research was conducted at the Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, France. For their study, Dr. Abramson and colleagues trained Wikie’s calf, Moana, to make five sounds outside of Wikie’s natural repertoire, including that of a creaking door, an elephant and a raspberry. Then they instructed Wikie to copy each vocalization, either by listening to Moana directly or through speakers. Both human and machine methods deemed Wikie successful at learning the novel sounds presented to her, including those uttered by humans. “This is the first study to show that killer whales can make recognizable copies of human sounds,” Dr. Abramson said, which is unexpected because orcas have very different anatomical structures for vocalization than us. |
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March 2018
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