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Alpha Bison: The Quieter Bellow Wins The Females
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Megan Wyman has earned the right to call herself a cowgirl; she's spent four summers in the Great Plains of Nebraska, much of it riding in the back of a pickup truck chasing after bison. But it's sound, not trophies, that she's after.
Wyman studies animal communication.
"I am trying to decipher exactly what a sexy, dominant bison male sounds like," she says. "More specifically, I am trying to decode bison bellows."
Wyman wants to know what acoustic qualities — frequency, duration, loudness — mark a male who is, you might say, a bon vivant with the ladies during mating season. Wyman thinks a male bison uses his bellow to defend his female(s) from other males, and also perhaps to influence the female to choose him as a mate.
Just what kind of bellow marks a good mate is still a mystery. Wyman's data suggest that "high quality" bison males bellow more quietly than "low quality" males, which is not what she expected. Wyman, a student at the University of California, Davis, published some of her findings in the November 2008 issue of the journal Animal Behavior.
Besides bellows, bison have a variety of sounds they make; sometimes it's just rapid, noisy breathing, sometimes it's like a motor revving up, and sometimes it's a low rumble. Cows and calves also communicate with each other with soft, short "tonal" calls.
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This year, Wyman is headed off to Great Britain and New Zealand to record another species: red deer.
"Amazing sounds," she says. Based on her bison recordings, that's easy to believe.
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