TOEFLリスニング

🎧 リスニング原文

Listen to part of a lecture in a biology class. The professor is discussing animal communication. Professor: Today we're going to talk about how animals communicate, and specifically, we'll look at a fascinating example: the waggle dance of honeybees. When a worker bee finds a good source of nectar, she returns to the hive and performs a series of movements that convey the location of the food to other bees. This dance involves a figure-eight pattern, and the angle of the dance relative to the vertical (which represents the sun's position) indicates the direction of the food. The duration of the waggle portion of the dance communicates the distance. Interestingly, researchers have found that bees can adjust their dance based on the quality of the food source—if the nectar is especially rich, they will repeat the dance more times. Also, bees seem to have a built-in ability to interpret the dance even in different conditions, like when the sun is obscured by clouds. They can use polarized light patterns in the sky as an alternative reference. So, this is a complex form of symbolic communication that allows bees to share precise information with remarkable efficiency.