This is scientific American 60 second science.

I'm Christopher and Tagyatta.

Songbirds produce a rich repertoire of sounds.

Songs of course, but also chatter calls, flight calls, and alarm calls, like this high-pitched

warning from a black-capped chickadee.

But chickadee's aren't the only ones endowed with chirping abilities.

Turns out a certain type of caterpillar can too.

Once again, here's the bird and then the caterpillar.

Sounds pretty darn similar.

Yeah, that's pretty crazy. Jessica Lindsay is a biologist at the University of Washington.

She says this species, the North American Walnut Sphinx Caterpillar, makes the sound using tiny pairs of breathing holes,

called sphericalacles.

They compress themselves lengthwise like an accordion and so that compression pushes air out of that

spherical making whistling sounds. A cool coincidence for sure, but here's where it gets interesting.

Lindsay then played the Caterpillar whistle through a speaker near a bird feeder,

and the birds of many different species duct for cover.

Sometimes we would see little nut hatches flicking their wings and that's a big signal of distress for them.

And sometimes they would take a really long time to return to feeding, which is a big indicator that they were taking that

whistling noise pretty seriously.

And whereas the birds were unperturbed by the song of a housefinch, the control sound, they

responded to the caterpillar whistles with almost the same urgency

as when they heard that real alarm call from a chickadee, suggesting the caterpillars are

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