Book 17, Question 15
Why Is a Rainforest So Loud?
A rainforest is packed with animals that call, buzz, and chirp. Frogs sing, insects click and hum, birds shout, and monkeys howl. Together they make a huge, noisy choir!
More fun facts
- Tropical forests are full of different sounds, made by animals that call, sing and buzz to communicate.
- Scientists think of the sound space in a forest as something animals compete for, like room on a crowded bus.
- If two calls overlap, they can drown each other out, so animals have reasons to avoid singing at the same time.
- In one wet tropical forest, a single kind of cicada changed when and how the local birds sang.
- Birds often went quiet the moment the cicadas started buzzing in the same pitch range.
- When birds did sing during cicada calls, they mostly used pitches the cicadas were not using.
- The Amazon has so many sounds that scientists use automatic recorders and computer math to measure the variety, instead of naming every animal by ear.
Sources: europepmc.org, europepmc.org
Questions kids ask
Where did scientists record the Amazon soundscape?
They recorded it in the Mamirauá protected area, a flooded forest in the Amazon, and found a regular pattern from hour to hour and day to day.