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. This dance is a form of symbolic communication. When a forager bee finds a good nectar source, she returns to the hive and performs a figure-eight dance on the vertical surface of the comb. The angle of the dance relative to the vertical indicates the direction of the food source in relation to the sun. The duration of the waggle run, the straight part of the dance, conveys the distance. For instance, a longer waggle run means the food is farther away. Interestingly, bees can also adjust their dance based on the quality of the food. If the nectar is especially rich, they dance more vigorously and repeat the dance more times. This information helps other bees in the colony locate the resource efficiently. However, there's a debate among researchers about whether this dance is truly intentional communication or just a byproduct of the bee's excitement. Some argue that the dance is an innate behavior, not a conscious act. But most evidence suggests that bees use the dance to recruit others, as they can even decode the message after a delay. So, the waggle dance remains a remarkable example of complex information transfer in the animal kingdom.