Air Raid

Recent research by Maren Vitousek, a graduate student from Princeton University, has shown that marine iguanas may be able to use mocking bird calls as forms of alerts. Hawks are a major predator for marine iguanas thus causing the reptiles to flee whenever an individual is in sight. Vitousek noticed that iguanas basking on the shore would start to raise their heads in attention before a hawk was even in sight. They realized that the iguanas were probably responding after mocking birds would make shrieking calls of alarm.

The research team brought hawk-accustomed iguanas from Santa Fe Island into the lab and studied their response to mocking bird calls. They then recorded the mocking birds’ normal song and their alarm calls then played them for the iguanas. They then measured the response of the iguanas. Then they found that sixty-percent of the time, the iguanas showed increased attention to the alarm calls. This experiment proved to be interesting primarily because iguanas are mute animals that don’t use sound to communicate with each other. Because of this fact, little is known about the iguanas’ hearing. The fact that they can pick up on the calls of other animals is intriguing to the scientific community. There exist many other species that use ease-dropping to better understand their environment. However, this behavior is intriguing from iguanas because they lack vocalization as a means of communication between each other.
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Posted By Hollis Martin (2)