The whole song seems to be an introduction for these snorts.” And in the song, the rarest thing, most interesting element, is the snort. “We found that the song is an advertisement for male quality. Weissman and his team recorded the songs of male hyraxes during mating season, and they analyzed their structure. “We’ve tried to understand the meaning of all this-why a hyrax would waste time and energy and expose himself to predators by singing such a loud song.” And these bouts are complex. And along the song, they get more and more complex, they get longer, they include more sounds.”īiomusicologist Yishai Weissman from Bar-Ilan University and Hebrew University in Israel. We know a lot of birds sing, but we don’t have many mammals that actually perform a song, a complex song with different syllables coming in bouts. “The hyraxes are a mammal that has a rare phenomenon, which is singing. They live in groups of up to 80 individuals. Meet the rock hyrax, sometimes called the rock rabbit or the dassie, common in rocky areas of Africa and the Middle East. So you might not think they’d be the closest living relatives to elephants.

They grow to about 20 inches long and weigh less than 10 pounds.

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