Speaking Loudly but Not Being Heard

There's a critter in Philippine jungles that's about as big as your hand, has big eyes, and runs its mouth a lot. You can't hear anything, though. But they can. The tarsier has its own special means of communication that is more than three times the upper limit of what humans can hear. I can name some people that it would be nice if they spoke beyond human hearing frequencies, but never mind about that now.

Image credit: NOAA / Tarsier in Philippines by Laura Fralinger, 2008

Naturally, some owlhoots had to spoil the real science with evolutionary assertions, saying things that are nothing but assertions put forward as science. They get paid for this. I'm in the wrong job, I bet I could make up "science", too. Hey, here's one: tarsiers have long legs and can jump huge distances, so they must have evolved from frogs. But seriously, evolutionary "science" aside, the tarsier is another example of the ingenuity of the Creator, and has nothing to do with particles-to-primate evolution.

It used to be thought that when the Philippines tarsier (Tarsius syrichta) opened its mouth it was simply yawning or stretching—because we couldn’t hear any sound. But when researchers took equipment used to record bats’ high-frequency chirps into the jungle, they discovered that these tiny nocturnal big-eyed primates were communicating with each other using ‘pure ultrasound’.

The dominant frequency of the tarsier’s ultrasonic call was 70 kilohertz, ranging up to 75 kHz—among the highest recorded for any terrestrial mammal. And the researchers discovered that tarsiers could hear up to 91 kHz (way beyond the 20 kHz limit of human hearing).

To read the rest, click on "The tarsier’s ‘secret speech’".