Zoologists have learned about the “secret greeting” of rats
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Israeli scientists have found that rats emit a squeak, imperceptible to the human ear, when they are happy to see someone.
It was previously known that rats are capable of producing both sounds in the human audible range (up to about 17 kilohertz) and higher ones.
Observing rats in a cage using special microphones, the authors of a publication in the journal Cell Reports Methods came to the conclusion that the rodents communicated with each other and sometimes made sounds, the frequency of which corresponded to “joyful” emotions. The sounds were not a response to specific actions of other rats and presumably conveyed the joy of communication as such.
Another sound that scientists were able to “overhear” using microphones turned out to be a soft and intermittent squeak within human hearing. The rats said it only when there were no people near them.
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