Soundbites is a weekly (biweekly, occasionally) feature of the coolest, newest bioacoustics, soundscape, and acoustic research, in bite-size form. Plus other cool stuff having to do with sound.

Frequency and amplitude can be used to identify individual wild wolves: these researchers developed a code that was able to identify captive Eastern wolves by their howls. Naturally, they wanted to see if it was possible to do a similar identification on wild wolves, and lo and behold, it worked! They used both frequency and amplitude to identify wolves; the use of amplitude is especially interesting. This has really great implications for use of acoustic monitoring in wolf surveys.

Social mole rats have more complex vocal repertoire than solitary mole rats: did you know mole rats had vocal repertoires? I didn’t. There are social species and solitary species, and here the idea is that sociality necessitates a more complex vocal repertoire than solitary life. Interesting implications for communication across lots of social species.

Signs of stress found in vocalizations of translocated elephants: an elephant herd got translocated, and their vocalizations showed that they were a little stressed out by that. They got higher-pitched, which is an indicator of stress.

Fun link of the week: The Times gets a bout of nostalgia and fills its newsroom with the sounds of typewriters. Maybe it’ll make their reporters more productive…or just infinitely more annoyed.