someone just told me that a ducks quack has no echo. is this true? and if it dosent echo how come? i thought anything that made noise could echo.

This is just an Internet-based urban legend. You probably read this on one of those lists of useless facts. As the web site below states, "It is indeed fortunate that the lists are usually composed of items of no real significance, because many of the entries are of dubious veracity. The purpose of these lists apparently is not to educate the masses (however trivially), but to induce readers into the information age equivalent of a scavenger hunt, sending them scurrying all over the Internet in an attempt to verify the truthfulness of the entries."

http://www.snopes.com/critters/wild/duckecho.htm

Well, I was at a zoo once that had ducks that were quacking, and I assure you that there was no echo.

well, no i didnt read it on the net. i tend not to read anything outside of answerpool for the exact reasons you mentioned. i was told this by an old teacher of mine. we ran into each other and got on the topic of weird unexplainable stuff and that came up. i was just wondering if there was any truth to this and if anyone has actually heard a ducks quack echo.

Ducks' quacks echo. Somewhere in AP, a list of these types of "facts" was posted, a very long list. About a third of the few hundred "facts" were wrong. If I can find it, I will link to it.

Using some very serious audio equipment and two white ducks, the guys at "Mythbusters" have proved that a "quack" does indeed echo, but that the echo is pretty much undetectable by the human ear. - MrsS

Trust only AnswerPool for all your Trivia needs.

MkStnfnz beat me to the punch with a link to Snopes, where I first learned of this myth. They say that, "...an acoustic research experiment was carried out at the University of Salford in Greater Manchester in 2003 to set this legend to rest." This probably preceded the Mythbusters experiment.

I can't imagine any particular sound that would not -- given acoustically reflective surfaces in the vicinity -- produce an echo.

Now if only we can find it in AP archives: I, that well-known duck-fancier (it's all right, they can't arrest you for it in France) F Puli, did find a recording of this Salford experiment (and I put it in a post complete with references). The investigation had been reported in New Scientist . It's all to do with the echo being 'absorbed' into the original quack.

Got it! Let's try this. My post was on 09/08/03 [US calendar] and the reference is to:

Queer echo?