托福听力

🎧 听力原文

Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. The professor is discussing animal communication. Professor: Today we're going to look at how animals communicate, and I want to focus on a particularly fascinating example: the waggle dance of honeybees. 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. These movements, called the waggle dance, convey information about the direction and distance of the food. The bee waggles its abdomen while moving in a straight line, then circles back. The angle of the straight line relative to vertical indicates the direction of the food relative to the sun. The duration of the waggle run tells the other bees how far the food is. Interestingly, if the food is very close, the bee performs a simpler round dance instead. This discovery, made by Karl von Frisch, was revolutionary because it showed that animals could transmit abstract information. However, some researchers later questioned whether the dance is truly symbolic or just a simple stimulus for other bees to follow the dancer's scent. Recent studies using robotic bees have confirmed that the dance does indeed guide other bees to the specific location. So, despite initial skepticism, the waggle dance is now widely accepted as a form of symbolic communication.