Good morning.
Friday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of forty-nine.
If you happen to enjoy a polite, turn-taking conversation today, you’ll not be alone. A marmoset may be having a similar experience. Asif Ghazanfar, a neurobiologist at Princeton University, finds that other than humans, marmosets are the only known species to take turns that way:
Marmosets are very friendly with one another and very talkative, including when they’re out of sight of each other. Given these cooperative traits, which marmosets share with humans, Ghazanfar and his colleagues wondered if the monkeys also engage in vocal turn-taking (as humans also do) to enhance their cooperation.
To find out, the researchers placed dyads (pairs) of adult common marmoset monkeys (Callithrix jacchus) at opposite corners of a room, which had a visually opaque but acoustically transparent curtain splitting the room in half, diagonally. Over the course of the experiment, they paired the 10 non-related monkeys in various combinations — five cagemate pairs and 22 non-cagemate pairs.
The team recorded 1,415 “phee” calls in 54 sessions. These calls, Ghazanfar explained, are very loud, high-pitched, long-distance vocalizations that marmosets use when separated from other group members.
Ghazanfar and his colleagues discovered that the dyads wouldn’t call out at the same time. Instead, the monkeys would take turns — about five seconds after one monkey called out, the other would respond. Not once did the dyads ever interrupt one another.
This vocal turn-taking is especially remarkable considering that some sessions lasted 30 to 40 minutes. Ghazanfar also noted that the phee calls between the dyads didn’t always alternate one-to-one. “If I am talking to someone, I could make a couple of statements before I get a response,” Ghazanfar said. “It was similar with the marmosets: They do take turns, but not every single call that one marmoset produces gets a response.”
On this day in 1967 Update: 1867!, America takes possession of Alaska:
…the U.S. formally takes possession of Alaska after purchasing the territory from Russia for $7.2 million, or less than two cents an acre. The Alaska purchase comprised 586,412 square miles, about twice the size of Texas, and was championed by William Henry Seward, the enthusiastically expansionist secretary of state under President Andrew Johnson.
Scientific American‘s daily trivia question asks about offspring, lots of them. (Clicking on the question leads to its answer.)
Mr. Adams,
I will forgive you for this one since you have been dead for over 141 as of the date on your “This day in History” post, but the correct date should be 1867 (which would make you only dead for a little over 41 years) and not 1967. In 1967, Alaska would have already been admitted as a state so I would hope that we would have taken possession of it by then.
David – thanks very much – that’s quite some difference – so askew that, as you note, Alaska would have been a state even before American possession. There are errors, and then there are errors possible through magic!