ABOVE: Naked mole rats have an impressive vocal repertoire of 17 unique sounds. The most common, the soft chirp, can be used to distinguish between colonies and individual mole rats.
FELIX PETERMANN, MDC
Each colony of naked mole rats speaks its own unique dialect of chirps, a social feature that appears to be mediated by the colony’s queen and learned during adolescence, according to a study published January 29 in Science. This ability to modify and adapt language may be the first example in a rodent of production learning—the type of language learning that humans use to create new sounds in response to our experiences—opening up a new model system for studying the joint evolution of vocal and social complexity.
“It’s surprising to find a new model of a social animal that has dialects,” says Thomas Park, a neurobiologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has studied naked mole ...
