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Even a turtle makes noise

Turtles also communicate with sound, just like amphibians, bridge lizards, and South American lungfish. Until now it was not known that these animals used acoustic signals to make contact with conspecifics, but now an international team of biologists has recorded the vocalizations and linked them to behavior where possible.

In Nature communications The researchers write this week how their findings also shed new light on the evolution of acoustic communication in a large group of vertebrates: it is said to have originated at least 407 million years ago.

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Even a turtle makes noise, listen. The standard

Sound signals serve a variety of purposes in the animal kingdom, from seducing a companion to caring for puppies or scaring off an enemy. Many vertebrates with lungs are known to produce complex sounds, for example many mammals, birds, crocodiles and frogs. These sounds arise because they push air upward from the lungs along structures such as the larynx.

Guttural harmonic sounds

But there are also other vertebrates with significantly quieter lungs, such as lizards, salamanders, and turtles, which are sometimes thought to make no sound at all, or use those sounds only to defend themselves against other animal species.

The researchers have now made sound recordings of 53 of these “silent” animal species (50 turtles, 1 lungfish, 1 bridge lizard and 1 amphibian). This shows that they actually produce harmonic guttural sounds. Other sounds were also recorded, such as tail rattling or shield rubbing, but those mechanical sounds were not considered communication.

Some of the turtles studied have produced up to 15 different calls, clearly linked, among other things, to the care of the young. A literature search showed that other less noisy species, including 29 salamander species, are also able to vocalize.

By combining data from experimental research and literature research with data on the “noisiest” species (including birds and frogs), the biologists provided an overview of more than 1,800 sound-producing vertebrates with lungs. They suspect that acoustical communication ability already existed in the last common ancestor of all those vertebrates. He lived about 407 million years ago.

Or, they speculate, perhaps communication also has a common origin with the sound signals that fish emit with their swim bladders, and the use of acoustic communication arose even earlier in evolution, some 550 million years ago.

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