Koala's Call: Making Love Not War
/Aficionados of cute animals may know that the koala, the officially adorable Australian marsupial, will, upon occasion, bellow. Previously, it was believed that these deep groaning noises produced by male koala's were used for announcing territorial information. However, a terrestrial ecologist at the University of Queensland, William Ellis, has used GPS and cell phones to show that the bellows are, most likely, actually mating calls used to attract females in the small hours of the night. The research, presented at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, is described in greater detail in Science by Elizabeth Pennisi.
