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I was watching a video on Youtube about Eland and they mentioned the clicking noises made by eland bulls as they walked. I assumed it was their hooves clipping each other as they walked so I looked it up more today and here's what I found. Guess I have never heard it before:
"Elands bulls have a strict pecking order that determines their access to females in the herd. On the few occasions when they fight, they hardly ever use their dangerous horns and hooves, preferring instead to prove their strength through neck-wrestling. Even these grapples are a rarity; most eland conflicts are settled without violence through a series of ritual signals. These signals include the bizarre knee-clicks which the bulls make with their front legs while walking. They sound like castanets and can be heard hundreds of meters away.
According to Jakob Bro-Jorgensen from the University of Jyvaskyla and Torben Dabelsteen from the University of Copenhagen, the clicks are a message to other males and their frequencies provide an honest and accurate measure of the individual’s size and fighting ability.
Bro-Jorgenson and Dabelsteen spent several months in Kenya studying the signals used by elands. Armed with little more than a microphone and a camera, they meticulously recorded information on 48 males and followed up on 14 of these a year later to see if they had changed at all. They found that the frequency of an eland’s knee-clicks reflects its size. The bigger the animal, the lower the frequency of its clicks and the deeper the resulting sound.
The clicks are made by the eland’s tendon. As it slips over a bone in the knee, it vibrates like a string, and like any string, the frequency of the sound wave it produces falls as its diameter and length increase. So as an eland grows and its tendon gets longer and wider, its knee-clicks deepen. Indeed, only one out of fourteen bulls produced higher clicks after the year-long gap, and it was clearly wasting away from poor health."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/n...-knees-to-prove-their-dominance/#.V2RfLBJnBAE
"Elands bulls have a strict pecking order that determines their access to females in the herd. On the few occasions when they fight, they hardly ever use their dangerous horns and hooves, preferring instead to prove their strength through neck-wrestling. Even these grapples are a rarity; most eland conflicts are settled without violence through a series of ritual signals. These signals include the bizarre knee-clicks which the bulls make with their front legs while walking. They sound like castanets and can be heard hundreds of meters away.
According to Jakob Bro-Jorgensen from the University of Jyvaskyla and Torben Dabelsteen from the University of Copenhagen, the clicks are a message to other males and their frequencies provide an honest and accurate measure of the individual’s size and fighting ability.
Bro-Jorgenson and Dabelsteen spent several months in Kenya studying the signals used by elands. Armed with little more than a microphone and a camera, they meticulously recorded information on 48 males and followed up on 14 of these a year later to see if they had changed at all. They found that the frequency of an eland’s knee-clicks reflects its size. The bigger the animal, the lower the frequency of its clicks and the deeper the resulting sound.
The clicks are made by the eland’s tendon. As it slips over a bone in the knee, it vibrates like a string, and like any string, the frequency of the sound wave it produces falls as its diameter and length increase. So as an eland grows and its tendon gets longer and wider, its knee-clicks deepen. Indeed, only one out of fourteen bulls produced higher clicks after the year-long gap, and it was clearly wasting away from poor health."
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/n...-knees-to-prove-their-dominance/#.V2RfLBJnBAE
