TOEFL Listening

🎧 Listening Transcript

Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. The professor is discussing animal communication. (Professor) Today we'll talk about the fascinating ways animals communicate, and I want to focus on a classic example: the waggle dance of honeybees. When a forager bee returns to the hive after finding a rich food source, it performs a series of movements on the vertical surface of the honeycomb. The dance consists of a figure-eight pattern, with a straight run in the middle. The angle of this straight run relative to the vertical indicates the direction of the food source in relation to the sun. The duration of the waggle run, that is, the time spent waggling, communicates the distance. Interestingly, if the food is very close, less than 50 meters, the bee performs a simpler round dance, which doesn't convey direction. This discovery, first described by Karl von Frisch, was groundbreaking. But for years, many scientists doubted that bees could use such symbolic communication. They argued that the bees were just following each other's scent or using other simple cues. However, subsequent experiments, like ones using robotic bees, have confirmed that the dance is indeed informative. So, this system shows a level of abstraction that we usually associate only with human language.