Rechercher dans ce blog

Friday, April 29, 2022

Harbour seals can learn how to change their voices to seem bigger - New Scientist

ragamnyakabar.blogspot.com

The vocal gymnastics of harbour seals, including the ability to significantly raise or lower their pitch, seem not to be down to anatomy but learning from one another

Life 29 April 2022
AMELAND. Common Seal - Gewone Zeehond - Phoca vitulina. AMELAND BEACH. DUTCH.; Shutterstock ID 667436896; purchase_order: 22 April online; job: Photo; client: NS; other:

A harbour seal (Phoca vitulina) on the beach

Shutterstock/emka74

Consider the squeak of a mouse and the low rumble of a lion’s roar. In the animal kingdom, bigger animals usually produce lower pitch sounds as a result of their larger larynges and longer vocal tracts. But harbour seals seem to break that rule: they can learn how to change their calls.

That means they can deliberately move between lower or higher pitch sounds and make themselves sound bigger than they really are.

“The information that is in their calls is not necessarily honest,” says Koen de Reus at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

Advertisement

An earlier study had shown that some pinnipeds, a group of animals that includes seals, sea lions and walruses, can learn new sounds or modify sounds that they hear. Now, de Reus and colleagues have shown that the vocal gymnastics of harbour seals are probably a product of vocal learning, not anatomy.

To investigate, the researchers examined the vocal tracts of 68 harbour seal pups (Phoca vitulina) that had died before reaching a year old. The seals came from Sealcentre Pieterburen, a seal rehabilitation facility in the Netherlands. In addition to looking at the animals’ vocal cords, the team also reviewed a collection of recorded seal sounds from animals they had weight information for to untangle any potential correlation between pitch and body size.

Their analysis revealed that there was no anatomical explanation for the seals’ tremendous vocal range. “We saw that there was no such structure that could help explain how they actually make and modify sounds,” says de Reus. Seals with as much as a 5 kilogram difference in body weight produced similar sounding calls. That left one explanation for the vocal gymnastics: they learned how to do it.

The ability to learn, modify and imitate new sounds is relatively rare, found only in animals such as humans, elephants, bats, seals, whales and some birds. The more we discover about other animals’ vocal abilities, the better we can understand the evolution of human speech, says de Reus. “I think that is one of the things that makes me excited to work on this project.” It is also another reason why it is so important to protect wildlife, he says.

Journal reference: Journal of Experimental Biology, DOI: 10.1242/jeb.243766

Sign up for Wild Wild Life, a free monthly newsletter celebrating the diversity and science of animals, plants and Earth’s other weird and wonderful inhabitants.

More on these topics:

Adblock test (Why?)



"seal" - Google News
April 30, 2022 at 02:22AM
https://ift.tt/A9Wajdb

Harbour seals can learn how to change their voices to seem bigger - New Scientist
"seal" - Google News
https://ift.tt/UZ5oqej
https://ift.tt/pfSZyW3

No comments:

Post a Comment

Search

Featured Post

This North Texas city has asked large trucks to avoid its quaint downtown. They come anyway - Yahoo News

ragamnyakabar.blogspot.com Glen Rose’s downtown — lined with boutiques, antique shops, bookstores and cafes in early 20th century building...

Postingan Populer