Dozens of species were assumed to be mute — until they were recorded making sounds

Cohen started recording his turtles to see if they made sounds. There is a hydrophone on the left side.

Gabriel Jorgewich Cohen

Birds and their songs, cats and their meows, frog and their ribbits are some of the sounds animals make.

Some animals are not known to the general public. Turtles talk. The tuataras, caecilians and lungfish are lesser known.

The answer is yes, according to a new paper in Nature Communications presenting evidence that many species are vocalizing.

Do you want to listen to the evidence? There is a giant softshell turtle. The caecilian is a limbless amphibian.

The paper's lead author is a PhD student at the University of Zurich.

After reading about a turtle in the Amazon making sounds, he wondered if his own pet tortoises were making sounds. A researcher at his former university in Brazil created a tool that was crucial to the research.

A microphone that goes underwater is what he developed. I began recording my own pets after taking it home. They made a lot of noises.

There was a project going on. He went to institutions in five countries to record animal species that were thought to be silent. Fifty species of turtles, caecilians, tuataras, and lungfish were recorded by him.

None of them were able to speak. The animals I recorded made sounds.

The findings point to a common Ancestor.

Neil Kelley says it's surprising how much we don't know about things that are common.

The conclusion of the paper makes sense according to Kelley. There are unique challenges in studying animal sounds.

Most vocal equipment is soft tissue based and it's hard to find that in the fossil record.

A tuatara, a rare reptile only found in the wild in New Zealand, was recorded at the UK's Chester Zoo.

Gabriel Jorgewich Cohen

Sound production and hearing are not the same thing. The hissing sounds of snakes are well known. They don't seem to be able to hear themselves hissing.

John Wiens is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona.

He thinks there's a connection between making sounds and acoustic communication.

The research team used several strategies to identify sounds used for communication, including using cameras to correlate sounds with behaviors that could demonstrate intention, and only including sounds that were recurrently produced and seemed.

The recording of these sounds is a step in the right direction.

"If you don't record these sounds and report them, there's no reason why anyone would study acoustic communication in those things," he said. You don't know that they make sounds.

He says that the next step is to figure out what the animals are saying.