Scientific American's 60-second science is called pakinam amer. I am pakinam ar.
Clicks, clucks, grunts, and snorts are not sounds that turtles usually make.
The audio of juvenile turtles from South America.
They are thought to be very quiet. We might have underestimated how much sound they can make. 53 species of turtles and other animals have been collected for a new study in Nature Communications.
The audio of juvenile turtles from South America.
Baby giant Amazon River turtles are making calls. The recordings were pored over by a group of evolutionary biologists and other scientists in five different countries.
Evidence shows that the last common ancestor of all lungfish and tetrapods started vocalizing more than 400 million years ago. If you aren't familiar with them, they are four-legged mammals, birds, and reptiles. Previous studies had suggested that it was 100 million years ago.
The new revelations are a rewrite of the acoustic history of animals.
I did fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon with a researcher that published a paper showing turtles can communicate, and that inspired me. I got a piece of equipment that I used to record my own pets. I found out that the species I had were not known to make sounds. I went out there and recorded as many as I could because I thought they all do.
Gabriel was a researcher at the University of Zurich. The Giant Amazon River turtles, also known as red-eared sliders in the US, are the pets he is talking about.
The only species that has post-hatch parental care is this one. They discovered this by recording the sounds of the animal, not only this species but also sea turtles. They have less chance of being eaten by other animals when they come out. The females of the Amazon River turtle are vocalizing when they go to the water. They go up the river to the forest after finding each other.
According to a study published in 2020, only two of 14 families of turtles vocalize. It was said that acoustic communication began in the range of 100 million to 200 million years ago. That isn't the case now.
When I discovered so many different types of sounds, I was very surprised. More and more animals were recorded by me. I had no negative results from the recordings of the animals. That was completely unexpected.
Hundreds of hours of footage were recorded over the course of two years, not just of turtles but also of lungfish, tuatara and other animals. It's useful.
For many turtle species, there are sounds that are only made by males, there are some that are only made by females, and some that are only made when the male is in front of the female.
The caecilian is the only animal from this study that I would say is completely blind. Caecilians are slimy, slithery and slippery, so let me tell you a little bit about them. They burrow and look like animals. They aren't either. They are actually salamanders. They don't have limbs but they emit sounds through their respiratory tract just like their ancestors. It is not easy to find one.
The caecilian was a special one because I was expecting it not to make noise. It makes very weird and loud noises.
The audio of caecilain is available.
That sounds like a fart.
When I heard it for the first time, I sent it to my friends who were working with me. They laughed and said, "I cannot believe you." You made the sound with your mouth and sent it to me. I said no and swore.
The study focuses on the evolution of acoustic signals rather than the function of the sounds. The researchers will try to understand what they mean by analyzing the sounds further.
We try to make footage of the animals while we're recording the sounds so we can correlate any type of behavior to the sound that they are making and try to understand how they use the sounds.
There were more than 30 different sounds in one species. The more socialized the animal is, the more vocal it is. There are more studies that need to be done.
This is the start of a new field of study. People are going to record more animals and get to new conclusions and discoveries. It will be cool if we could try to understand if they reply to the sounds we make in a way that would be1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556 We can begin to understand what these sounds mean.
Amer thanks you for listening. I'm pakinam Amer and I'm for Scientific American's 60-second science.
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