TOEFL Listening

🎧 Listening Transcript

Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. Professor: So, we've been discussing animal communication, and today I want to focus on a fascinating example: the honeybee's waggle dance. When a foraging bee returns to the hive after finding a good food source, it performs a series of movements on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. This dance encodes information about the direction and distance of the food. The direction is indicated by the angle of the dance relative to the sun's position, and the distance is indicated by the duration of the waggle phase. For instance, if the food is directly toward the sun, the bee dances straight up. If the food is at an angle to the sun, the dance is offset by that same angle. This discovery, made by Karl von Frisch, was revolutionary because it showed that bees have a symbolic language, not just simple signals. However, recent research has added nuance: the dance's accuracy can be affected by factors like wind speed and the bee's previous experience. So, while the waggle dance is a remarkable system, it's not always perfectly precise.