By Victoria Gill
Science correspondent.
The image is from UC Santa Cruz.
The image caption is.
The researchers marked the mothers and pups.
"In a seal colony, hundreds of mothers and pups call at the same time," explains Dr. Caroline Casey.
The research shows that elephant seals can pick out their baby's voice just two days after birth.
During a precarious time, this ability helps pups and mothers survive.
Researchers are puzzled over why female seals feed each other's pups.
The image is from UC Santa Cruz.
The image caption is.
Long boom poles were used to record individual pups.
"Females fast for the entire month they are nursing," says Dr.Casey, who is based at the University of California Santa Cruz. It makes no sense for them to use their resources on another mother's pup.
There have been a lot of observations of females feeding pups not related to them at the colony that we study.
For the past decade, Dr.Casey has studied vocal communication in elephant seals. She and her colleagues wanted to find out if the animals could hear their own babies in the noise of a breeding colony.
The scientists recorded calls of individual pups and played them to the mother elephant seals using a small speaker.
The mothers' responses to recordings of their own pups were monitored by the researchers. If the small speaker was playing the sound of their own children, mothers were much more attentive.
The image is from UC Santa Cruz.
The image caption is.
A mother elephant seal is moving towards a speaker.
"We see the recognition after a day or two," said Dr.Casey.
The relationship between mother and newborn elephant seal is very dependent on the mother.
When the pups are fed, mothers lose half their body mass, and pups gain seven-fold, because of the "fat content" of their mother's milk.
The elephant seals' urge to feed other pups of closely related females may have been caused by humans.
The species was hunted to near extinction in the late 1800s. "So we think all of the individuals alive today are related to about 20 animals that survived," said Dr.
The genetic similarity between elephant seals is very high.
Are they more likely to feed the pups of sisters or cousins? Is that behavior linked to an extreme population problem?
"That's something we would like to investigate," Dr.
The caption is media.
The sounds of an elephant seal are rather rude.
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