Page 92 - World of Animals - Issue #39

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answers

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Can giraffes make sounds?
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Long-thought to be a mute animal, recent research horses. It’s thought that because a giraffe’s neck is

has found that giraffes hum at night. The sounds so long, the airflow through the trachea can’t vibrate
are so subtle that the recordings needed to be the vocal chords to produce sound that’s as loud as
examined visually. The soundwaves of almost 1,000 a horse’s neigh.
hours revealed regular patterns of low-frequency The function of this night-time humming isn’t
sounds that continued throughout the night. The clear, but researchers think it serves to keep the
audio has a frequency of just over 90 hertz, which is group together. Giraffes are highly visual and always
just inside the human range of hearing. try to stay in each other’s eyeline. At night when the
The vocal chords vibrate to make noise, and in animals can’t see each other, it is thought that they
giraffes the sound production system is similar to hum to let others know exactly where they are.
How long can tapeworms grow?
These parasitic worms can reach host is dead, the parasite is too) and
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lengths of up to 15 metres (50 feet) becoming any longer would likely cause
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inside the intestinal tract of their host. permanent damage. Tapeworms live
Its body is divided into up to 2,000 in the small intestine of their host, and
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sections called proglottids, and the i in fact there are 100 species within the
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tapeworm reproduces by dispersing Taenia genus. Each species targets a
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some of these body sections into the specific animal, but they are found most t
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gut. These then exit with the digested commonly in cows and pigs. That’s
food and wait until they can find their generally how they end up in humans,

way into another host. The trick to so if having a tapeworm is your worst ABOVE A 3D rendering of a

being a successful parasite is to keep nightmare, maybe laying off the red tapeworm, showing how it
your host alive and healthy (once a meat is a good idea. looks from a side-on view
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092-094_AnimalAnswers.indd 92 12/10/2016 15:58