Smithsonian.com

Roosters have an internal circadian rhythm, which keeps them crowing on schedule even when the lights are turned off. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Muhammad Mahdi Karim

Some scientists investigate the universe’s biggest mysteries, like the Higgs boson, the mysterious particle that endows all other subatomic particles with mass.

Other researchers look into questions that are, well, a bit humbler—like the age-old puzzle of whether roosters simply crow when they see light of any kind, or if they truly know to crow when the morning sun arrives.

Lofty or not, it’s the goal of science to answer all questions that arise from the natural world, from roosters to bosons and everything in between. And a new study by Japanese researchers published today in Current Biology resolves the rooster question once and for all: The birds truly do have an inner circadian rhythm that tells when to crow.

The research team, from Nagoya University, investigated via a fairly straightforward route: They put several groups of four roosters in a room for weeks at a time, turned the lights off, and let a video camera running. Although roosters can occasionally crow at any time of day, the majority of their crowing was like clockwork, peaking in frequency at time intervals roughly 24 hours apart—the time their bodies knew to be morning based on the sunlight they’d last seen before entering the experiment.

This consistency continued for about 2 weeks, then gradually began to die out. The roosters were left in the room for 4 weeks in total, and during the second half of the experiment, their crowing began occurring less regularly, at any time of day, suggesting that they do need to see the sun on a regular basis for their circadian rhythms to function properly.

In the experiment’s second part, the researchers also subjected the roosters to alternating periods of 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness, while using bright flashes of light and the recorded crowing of roosters (since crowing is known to be contagious) to induce crowing at different times of day. When they activated these stimuli near at or near the dawn of the roosters’ 12-hour day, crowing rates increased significantly. At other times of day, though, exposing them to sudden flashes of light or playing the sound of crowing had virtually no effect, showing that the underlying circadian cycle played a role in the birds’ response to the stimuli.

Of course, many people who live in close proximity to roosters note that they often crow in response to a random light source turning on, like a car’s headlights, no matter what time of day it is. While this may be true, the experiment shows that the odds of a rooster responding to a car’s headlights depend on how close the current time is to dawn—at some level, the rooster’s body knows whether it should be crowing or not, and responding to artificial stimuli based on this rhythm.

For the research team, all this is merely a prelude to their bigger, more complex questions: Why do roosters have a biological clock that controls crowing in the first place, and how does it work? They see the simple crowing patterns of the rooster as an entry point into better understanding the vocalizations of a range of animals. “We still do not know why a dog says ‘bow-wow’ and a cat says ‘meow,’” Takashi Yoshimura, one of the co-authors, said in a press statement. “We are interested in the mechanism of this genetically controlled behavior and believe that chickens provide an excellent model.”