Rodent Bioacoustics by Micheal L. Dent & Richard R. Fay & Arthur N. Popper

Author:Micheal L. Dent & Richard R. Fay & Arthur N. Popper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319924953
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

5.4.4 Chinchillas

The chinchilla is native to the Andes Mountains of South American and they live in herds. Domesticated chinchillas are popular in auditory research because of their broad hearing range (see Dent, Screven, and Kobina, Chap. 4). Relative to other rodents, chinchillas are good at sound localization with average MAAs of about 16° for broadband sounds in left–right discriminations in the horizontal plane (Heffner et al. 1994). In contrast to most other rodent species tested, chinchillas can localize both low and high frequency noise and pure tones, indicating that they use both ITDs and ILDs (Heffner et al. 1994). Maximum ILDs fall below 10 dB for frequencies below 5 kHz and range from 10 dB to 30 dB above 5 kHz (Koka et al. 2011). Maximum ITDs range from 236 μs to 336 μs (Koka et al. 2011).

A minimum audible angle of 23° in the median vertical plane has been determined for chinchillas (Heffner et al. 1995). Pinna removal experiments resulted in small performance deficits in left–right discrimination of low-pass filtered noise in the horizontal plane (but not broadband noise), small impairments in front–back localization, and large impairments in the median vertical plane (Heffner et al. 1996). Directional transfer functions show prominent spectral notches between 6 kHz and 18 kHz, and pinna removal reduces spectral notches, ILDs, and ITDs as observed in rats (Koka et al. 2011).

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