NEW YORK\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Horses whinny to find new friends, greet old ones and celebrate happy moments like feeding time.<\/p>\n
How exactly horses produce that distinctive sound \u2014 also called a neigh \u2014 has long eluded scientists. <\/p>\n
The whinny is an unusual combination of both high and low-pitched sounds \u2014 like a cross between a grunt and a squeal \u2014 that come out at the same time. <\/p>\n
The low-pitched part wasn\u2019t much of a mystery. It comes from air passing over bands of tissue in the voice box that make noise when they vibrate. It\u2019s a technique similar to how humans speak and sing.<\/p>\n
But the high-pitched piece is more puzzling. With some exceptions, larger animals have larger vocal systems and typically make lower sounds. So how do horses do it?<\/p>\n
According to a new study, they whistle.<\/p>\n
Researchers slid a small camera through horses\u2019 noses to film what happened inside while they whinnied and made another common horse sound, the softer, subtler nicker. They also conducted detailed scans and blew air through the isolated voice boxes of dead horses.<\/p>\n
The whinny\u2019s mysterious high-pitched tones, they discovered, are a kind of whistling that starts in the horse\u2019s voice box. Air vibrates the tissues in the voice box while an area just above contracts, leaving a small opening for the whistle to escape.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s different from human whistling, which we do with our mouths.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019d never imagined that there was a whistling component. It\u2019s really interesting, and I can hear that now,\u201d said Jenifer Nadeau, who studies horses at the University of Connecticut. Nadeau was not involved with the study, which was published Monday in the journal Current Biology.<\/p>\n
A few small rodents like rats and mice whistle like this, but horses are the first known large mammal to have a knack for it. They\u2019re also the only animals known to be able to whistle through their voice boxes while they sing.<\/p>\n
\u201cKnowing that a \u2018whinny\u2019 is not just a \u2018whinny,\u2019 but that it is actually composed of two different fundamental frequencies that are created by two different mechanisms, is exciting,\u201d Alisa Herbst, with Rutgers University\u2019s Equine Science Center, said about the study in an email.<\/p>\n
A big lingering question is how horses\u2019 two-toned calls came to be. Wild Przewalski\u2019s horses can do something similar, as can elks. But more distant horse relatives such as donkeys and zebras can\u2019t make the high-pitched sounds.<\/p>\n
The two-toned whinnies could help horses convey multiple messages at the same time. The differently pitched neighs may help them express a more complex range of feelings when socializing, said study author Elodie Mandel-Briefer with the University of Copenhagen.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can express emotions in these two dimensions,\u201d Mandel-Briefer said.<\/p>\n
Ramakrishnan writes for the Associated Press. Associated Press video journalist James Brooks contributed to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Horses whinny to find new friends, greet old ones and celebrate happy moments like feeding time. How…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[74109,86342,9809,40951,14140,61,60,146821,146822,146820,32990,12552,82,2717,92035,430,146818,146819],"class_list":{"0":"post-314135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-air","9":"tag-animal-kingdom","10":"tag-connecticut","11":"tag-horse","12":"tag-human","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-jenifer-nadeau","16":"tag-large-animal","17":"tag-neigh","18":"tag-new-study","19":"tag-same-time","20":"tag-science","21":"tag-scientist","22":"tag-tissue","23":"tag-university","24":"tag-voice-box","25":"tag-whinny"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}