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A Quick Breath Lets Male Tokay Geckos Stretch Their Mating Calls
Key Takeaways
- Male tokay geckos are among the few non-bird reptiles that vocalize, calling to attract mates, defend territory and signal distress.
- Their signature call opens with quiet rattles before a louder two-part sound often heard as "ge-ko" or "to-kay."
- Previous work showed that in noisy environments males produce more of the loud two-part calls and make them longer, but how they managed this while breathing was unclear.
- Researchers at the University of Southern Denmark combined acoustic analysis with deep learning-based pose estimation to quantify respiratory dynamics during spontaneous calling.
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DT Editorial Team··via phys.org