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Article25 May 2011ScienceHistory

Alligators make Faraday waves on purpose

Male alligators bellow at a frequency low enough to throw standing wave patterns off the water on their backs.

Open at wired.com ↗WIRED · Devin Powell · 4 min

Devin Powell's 2011 Wired piece reports research presented at an Acoustical Society of America meeting in Seattle: male alligators, part-submerged and quivering their backs during mating displays, generate Faraday waves in the water above them. The dancing spray along the spikes is not incidental splashing but a parametric standing-wave pattern of the kind normally seen on a laboratory shaker.

It is a short news item, and the underlying work was a conference presentation rather than a full paper, so treat the detail lightly. What holds up is the observation itself, which is now cited in the standard references on Faraday waves.

We like it as a demonstration that nothing about this phenomenon requires a signal generator. A big enough animal producing a low enough note over a shallow enough layer of water gets the same physics, and the display is presumably legible to other alligators for exactly that reason.

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