This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins.

Got a minute? Sometimes a snoutful of snot can be just what the doctor ordered.

At least if you're a dolphin.

Because a new study shows that a little bit of mucus helps these marine mammals generate the

rapid-fire stream of clicks they emit and use for echo location. First off, let's just get this out of the way. Dolphins do not

actually sound like this. That's a made-for- TV giggle that some say is

actually the doctored call of a bird, the Australian

Kukabara.

Real dolphins, like these bottlenoses, sound more like this. They use their clicks, chirps and whistles to navigate, communicate, and to catch their next meal.

The high frequency clicks in particular help Flipper and his kind locate and track fish dinners. Dolphins make these sounds by forcing air through a nasal passage just beneath the blowhole. In this nasal region are lip-like flaps of tissue called

dorsal bursay that vibrate and collide to produce dolphin talk. Now a team of

researchers has created a simplified model that can reproduce this characteristic dolphin

chatter and they found that the secret ingredient is snot.

While looking through the literature, oceanographer Aaron Thoads stumbled across a model that represented vocal cords as masses connected by springs, which store and release energy, and dampers which dissipate that energy.

This model successfully replicated the essential characteristics of the system,

like the frequency of vocal cord vibration.

So Thoden listed his father Lester, a retired nuclear physicist from Los Alamos National Lab, to help him fit the model to a dolphin's nasal anatomy.

When the Thoads compared the simulated sounds produced by their model to a recording of actual the that are part of the natural click.

That's the sound, but slowed down to make it audible to our ears. The initial thud comes from when those dorsal burset collide.

And the reverberation results from the vibrations that linger when the tissues pull apart.

But though the younger says the burset have to be somewhat sticky for the clapping together and snapping apart to produce a noise

with the correct loudness and pitch. That stickiness comes courtesy of the mucus.

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