Oceanographers have discovered that the European lobster was the noisiest animals of the Earth, the friction of their antennae, you can hear or feel at a distance of about three kilometers from them. The results of their observations were published the scientific journal Scientific Reports.
"Before, we knew almost nothing about how far spread the sounds of various marine invertebrates. We have filled this gap, finding that a common European lobster can produce clicks, which their relatives and other inhabitants of the seas will be heard at a distance of hundreds of meters," write the researchers.
In recent years, biologists increasingly find that the strong, keen and quick creatures on Earth, given the differences in size are not mammals or other large vertebrate creatures, and land or sea arthropods and other invertebrates.
In particular, recently, scientists have found that sea mantis can beat their claws on the shells of their victims as much as a bullet fired from a gun, and predatory flies-ctyri very precisely zero in on their victims and almost always catch them, despite the fact that they have no complex brain.
Similarly, the crickets and cicadas can lift themselves to a height of 100 times larger than themselves, and spiders-bokachoda can correct the motion in the jump with a precision that is not available to the professional skaters and the most clever mammals.
the
Live underwater siren
Oceanographers from France and the United States under the leadership of Julien Bones from the Oceanographic Institute woods hole (USA), checking the operation of the system of underwater microphones, accidentally opened one such invertebrate "record". Scientists have developed it in order to study the acoustic signals exchanged between different marine invertebrates.
Submerging the array of microphones in the shallow waters off the West coast of Brittany, the researchers produced near them the usual European lobster (Palinurus elephas), which they pre-fished in the Atlantic ocean. After some time, oceanographers began to record the sounds, checking how well worked they created the device and how well it recorded the signals of crustaceans of different sizes.
These experiments unexpectedly showed that the lobster was one of the loudest animals on Earth. They made sounds, the volume was comparable to the roar of the engine turbojet aircraft or shot from a large-caliber revolver. The sounds were transmitted at distances from 10 to 400 meters. According to scientists, at the bottom of the ocean where these crustaceans live, the sounds must be audible at a distance of 2-3 kilometers.
The source of these acoustic waves, as shown by observations of individual lobsters was their Wuxi��I. Invertebrates Ter them on chitinous outgrowth, which is located between their eyes. Why do Palinurus elephas, is not yet clear, but scientists suggest that they can use these sounds as to alert relatives, and in order to scare off predators.
Scientists plan to use these sounds as a kind of underwater "radar", which will monitor the ecological condition of the bottom of the Atlantic without external signal sources. In addition, the observation of changes in the "volume" such clicks will enable oceanographers to track poachers who illegally caught lobster off the coast of France and in other regions of the World ocean.
