Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, a bioacoustician from the Fauna Communications Research Institute in North Carolina, presented her research at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Newport Beach. Bioacoustics is the study of the frequency or pitch, loudness, and duration of animal sounds to learn about an animal's behaviour. The lower the frequency, the farther the distance the sound can travel.
Scientists believe that infrasound is the missing link in studying tiger communication.
In the first study of its kind, von Muggenthaler and her colleagues recorded every growl, hiss, chuff, and roar of twenty- four tigers at the Carnivore Preservation Trust in Pittsboro, North Carolina, and the Riverbanks Zoological Park in Columbia, South Carolina. Bioacousticians found that tigers can create sounds at about 18 hertz and when tigers roar they can create frequencies significantly below this. Due to copyright restrictions, we are unable to provde the full text of this article.