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In many, many ways, fish of the species Brienomyrus brachyistius do not speak at all like Barack Obama. For starters, they communicate not through a spoken language but through electrical pulses booped out by specialized organs found near the tail. Their vocabulary is also quite unpresidentially poor, with each individual capable of producing just one electric wave—a unique but monotonous signal. “It’s even simpler than Morse code,” Bruce Carlson, a biologist at Washington University in St. Louis who studies Brienomyrus fish, told me. |
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In at least one significant way, though, fish of the species Brienomyrus brachyistius do speak a little bit like Barack Obama. When they want to send an important message …
They stop, just for a moment.
Those gaps tend to occur in very particular patterns, right before fishy phrases and sentences with “high-information content” about property, say, or courtship, Carlson said. Electric fish have, like the former president, mastered the art of the dramatic pause—a rhetorical trick that can help listeners cue in more strongly to what speakers have to say next, Carlson and his colleagues report in a study published today in Current Biology. |
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