Researchers spent two years documenting 'talking' behavior in 50 species of turtles
When it comes to the most "talkative" creatures in the animal kingdom, one might think of songbirds, dolphins, and humans themselves. And turtles, which are considered "taciturn" in people's minds, may not be included.
But in fact, this charismatic reptile communicates through a plethora of clicks, snorts, and clucks. By recording the "sounds" of turtles and other animals thought to be quiet, scientists have concluded that all land vertebrate vocalizations, from birdsong to lion roars, share a common origin, dating back more than 400 million years. Related research was published in Nature-Communications on October 25.
W. Tecumseh Fitch, a biostatistician at the University of Vienna in Austria, who was not involved in the study, said the findings suggest that animals began to vocalize early in evolutionary history, even before they had well-developed ears, which means that ears evolved listen to these voices.
A few years ago, University of Arizona evolutionary ecologist John Wiens and his graduate student Zhuo Chen began to study the evolutionary origins of vocal communication (basically defined as the sounds that animals make with their mouths). Combining the scientific literature, the pair compiled a genealogy map of all vocal animals known at the time. Scientists eventually concluded that this vocalization ability appeared multiple times in vertebrates between 200 million and 100 million years ago.
But Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, discovered an animal that Wiens et al. At the time, Wiens and Chen Zhuo found that only two of the 14 turtles were vocal, but Jorgewich-Cohen found that many more were vocal. He spent two years documenting the "talking" behavior of 50 species of turtles.
Jorgewich-Cohen and colleagues also discovered three previously unknown creatures that make sounds: a legless amphibian, the caecilian, a New Zealand reptile resembling a lizard, the tuatara, Air-breathing freshwater fish, a close relative of terrestrial animals - lungfish.
"They did get some pretty extraordinary records from some extraordinary species," Fitch said.
Among the 53 species recorded by Jorgewich-Cohen's team, the fist-sized spotted-legged woodgrain turtle, which is sold as a pet, is capable of making more than 30 sounds, such as the squeaks of mating males and the "crying" sound only made by young turtles. "Voice. In general, some of the sounds it makes are associated with aggression, while others appear to be greeting new partners, usually with a head bob.
By adding these previously unknown sounds to existing acoustic communication data, Jorgewich-Cohen and colleagues constructed a more comprehensive new acoustic evolutionary tree of about 1,800 species. In their paper, they noted that each branch of the evolutionary tree contained vocal animals, suggesting that vocal behavior evolved only once in the common ancestor of terrestrial animals and lungfish about 407 million years ago.
Currently, Jorgewich-Cohen and colleagues are documenting how turtles and other quieter species use sound, and are comparing the sounds of terrestrial vertebrates and lungfish with those of other fish to see if the new acoustic evolutionary tree extends over time go further.
(Original title "Animals "speak" before they have no ears, voice communication began 400 million years ago")
Related paper information:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33741-8