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Cock-a-doodle-doo!!!

Imagine waking up in the morning to sound that's as loud as a chainsaw, or to loud chimes that sound like engineers just installed the famous London Bigben clock in your bedroom. Trust me, that's not the best experience one would wish for on a weekend morning,, - your one morning indoors, away from the rigours of the city's traffic, gets cut short by an unpleasantly loud crow of a rooster!

Having two loud roosters at home when i was much younger left bitter-sweet memories for the family. The incessant crows every morning, the coop, their feed, the final flavour (Lol... we didn't get to eat them anyway) etc. However, it did come with a few perks, the most important one being that I was never late for school again!

Ever since people became farmers, there's a lot more reasons roosters are still kept in farms today, apart from the task of mounting hens. One unique reason is their ability to function as a natural alarm clock, by disturbing the whole neighbourhood. Every morning, few hours to the light of dawn, Roosters would sound the proud alarms and wake up every living thing in the surrounding. They crow, and yeah, we've probably heard it a lot of times and it doesn't seem intriguing or remotely amusing to us at all.

But here's the big news: According to research carried out by a team of scientists from the university of Antwerp and Gent, Belgium, a rooster's crow could get as loud as 130db in 1 - 2 seconds, and if we're at all familiar with the science of sound, then we know that's quite astronomically loud coming from an animal as small as a rooster. 130db is as loud as standing at about 15 metres from a jet-plane, steaming to take off.

According to science, 140db is enough to shatter the human eardrum. Comparing that fact to the rooster's 130db, they literally SHOULD go deaf the first instant they ever tried to crow that hard, but that isn't the case.

I find that intriguing, and today, for the love of science, I'm wiling to explore it all, with particular interest on why we still have mature roosters roaming the neighborhood with their ears intact.

Firstly, let's get to understand this animal, and why it crows.

WHY ROOSTERS CROW --- Wake up wake up!!!

Next to cat's meow or a dog's bark, the crow of a rooster is easily the most recognizable animal noises on the planet. There's a number of reasons why roosters crow, and its mostly in response to external stimuli. This could range from the honk of a car, to people stepping on their coop, but One thing we know about this animal is that they could get really territorial, and won't hesitate to point that out every chance they've got.

Typically, roosters crow just before the crack of dawn each day, and scientists discovered that there's more to it than the earlier accepted fallacy of their natural reaction to sunrise or light. Turns out roosters have an internal clock mechanism, some kinda internal... thing, almost similar to the circadian rhythm,- the sleep/wake cycle in plants and animals that makes us feel drowsy at night even if we slept all day.-

They know exactly when it's time to crow because they anticipate dawn

In an experiment conducted to disapprove the notion that light had everything to do with a rooster's crow, scientists Yoshimura and Tsuyoshi of Nagoya University, Japan, kept roosters in a dim lit condition for 14 days, and discovered that they ran a 23.8-hour day, and would repeatedly crow at about 2 hours to dawn every morning, regardless of the fact that they saw no light. This indicates that the rooster's internal clock takes precedence over external factors.

Pecking order. --- Time to remind every who's boss here!

Also, on why they crow, there is generally a social rank "thingy" among animals that make them do weird things. Mammals are known to urinate on trees and tall standing objects to mark territories, and as a warning to competing mammals to keep off. For our roosters, it's the pecking order. and they would often crow to show signs of strength and presence, and as a really 'sound' warning to other roosters to stay way from their turf!. Hence, the louder they are, the more dominant they are seen.

WHY THEY DON'T GO DEAF. -- It's all in the ears!!

So we've established the reasons behind the roosters' crow. -the louder, the better- and from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense.

Since loudness makes them fit, then it follows that the most successful "crowers" would be individuals with slightly more ear modifications that would permit even more loudness without going deaf in the process. -Source

Research and CT (micro-computerized tomography) scans show that a rooster's ears are incredibly designed to shut off half part of the eardrum when the rooster crows. Inside the ears of the rooster, there is a soft tissue (like an earbud) that expands to protect the ear from the racket. This technical feature doesn't exist in the ears of the hens and chicks, and one might wonder why nature evolved such an ability in roosters that risks deafening a whole nest of hens and chicks!

Well, the good news is, hens do not go deaf from our rooster's call. That's because the canals of their ears slightly shut whenever a cock crows, and even though this isn't as effective as the rooster's bud, it helps dampen the sound pretty well. So there isn't any permanent damage done to them. A paper describing this research was published in the journal zoology.

Another reason why this wouldn't negatively affect the nest is that birds, alike reptiles and the pisces division (fishes), has a way of regenerating hair cells of the inner ear if they ever get damaged. This would help recover hearing in loud papa rooster's family if at all any damage were to be done, and scientists are currently studying and exploring this interesting feature in these animals to see if deafness and hearing loss could be averted in humans. But until then, stay the hell away from a rooster, especially when big-boy's about doing his Bigben thing, pretty please!

PS: Here's a summary video that could serve as reference for this post. Ignore that... lol... Watch this compilation of roosters crowing if, like me today, you have too much time to kill...

Thank you for reading,

@pangoli

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REFERENCES

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