TOEFLリスニング

🎧 リスニング原文

Narrator: Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. Professor: So we've been talking about animal communication, and today I want to focus on a fascinating example: the waggle dance of honeybees. When a foraging bee returns to the hive, it performs a series of movements that convey information about the location of a food source. The dance consists of a figure-eight pattern. The straight part of the dance, called the waggle run, is the key. The angle of the waggle run relative to vertical indicates the direction of the food source relative to the sun. For example, if the bee waggles straight up, the food is directly toward the sun. The duration of the waggle run encodes the distance. A longer waggle run means the food is farther away. Interestingly, researchers have found that bees adjust their dance based on the quality of the food source. If the nectar is especially rich, they repeat the dance more vigorously. This behavior shows a level of abstract symbolic communication that is quite remarkable for insects. Now, some critics argue that the dance is not truly symbolic because it's limited to a narrow set of messages. But I'd say the evidence strongly supports that it functions as a language of sorts, albeit a simple one.