Alligators are full of surprises, but a closer inspection of their heads has revealed the predators have been hiding what amounts to an Aquaman-style superpower.
“New research shows that alligators … can hear underwater,” the University of Georgia’s Coastal Ecology Lab reported in a Jan. 15 Facebook post highlighting the study.
“The alligator can tune their hearing to land or water by adjusting how tight the tympanic membrane is stretched. Moreover, they believe that this is part of an alligator’s submergence reflex and that it occurs automatically when an alligator goes underwater.”
This is not to say American alligators hear as well underwater as they do on land, researchers with Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine in Missouri concluded.
It just means they “hear better underwater than other animals,” the Coastal Ecology Lab reported.
This is in addition to being able to see underwater, due to a second set of eyelids that “act as underwater goggles,” experts say.
The newly discovered hearing ability makes perfect sense for an aquatic reptile known to hunt its prey “on land, at the water surface, and underwater,” the report notes.
Kirksville College scientists came to their conclusions after dissecting the ears of nine euthanized alligators “to see how the muscles of the ears worked.”
The test subjects, both juveniles and adults, were ”purchased commercially or obtained through the courtesy of the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries.” The biggest was 9 feet, 9 inches long, the report states.
Details of the team’s discoveries were published by the American Association for Anatomy in an article titled “The anatomical basis of amphibious hearing in the American alligator.”
Much about the alligator ear is unusual, the study noted, including the fact they are located under flaps and the eardrum is “positioned deep from the surface of the skull.”
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