\u201cLeopard seal songs have a surprisingly structured temporal pattern,\u201d said Lucinda Chambers, a PhD candidate at UNSW and the study\u2019s lead author. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen we compared their songs to other studies of vocal animals and of human music, we found their information entropy \u2013 a measure of how predictable or random a sequence is \u2013 was remarkably close to our own nursery rhymes<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n But don\u2019t mistake the singing for lullabies. The seals aren\u2019t crooning to their young. In fact, it\u2019s the males who do most of the vocalizing, and their reasons have more to do with competition and courtship.<\/p>\n How leopard seals spend their spring days<\/p>\n Leopard seals live in the icy waters around Antarctica. They\u2019re apex predators who spend most of their lives alone. But during spring, from late October to early January, something changes.<\/p>\n Male seals<\/a> begin a daily ritual. They swim beneath the pack ice and sing. For hours on end, they alternate two minutes underwater with two minutes at the surface, cycling through this pattern up to 13 hours a day.<\/p>\n Study co-author Professor Tracey Rogers from UNSW began recording leopard seal songs in the 1990s.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re incredibly committed. It\u2019s big business for them,\u201d said Professor Rogers. \u201cThey\u2019re like the songbirds of the Southern Ocean. During the breeding<\/a> season, if you drop a hydrophone into the water anywhere in the region, you\u2019ll hear them singing.\u201d<\/p>\n Songs that carry across long distances<\/p>\n These aren\u2019t random noises. The calls are composed of five core sounds shared by the population. What makes each seal\u2019s song unique isn\u2019t the sound itself, but the order and structure.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t tell them apart by how the call sounds. It\u2019s the order and pattern that matters,\u201d explained Professor Rogers.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019ve stylized it to an almost boring degree, which we think is a deliberate strategy, so their call carries a long distance across the ice.\u201d<\/p>\n Purpose of the leopard seal calls<\/p>\n Male leopard seals are spread far apart on the sea ice, but their voices carry. A single call can travel long distances underwater<\/a>. That\u2019s useful during breeding season, when females are only in heat for a few days each year.<\/p>\n \u201cThe greater structure in their songs helps ensure that distant listeners can accurately receive the message and identify who is singing,\u201d noted Chambers.<\/p>\n The singing might help attract mates, but it also sends a signal to rivals. These underwater performances could be about love \u2013 or territory.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a bit of a dual message,\u201d said Professor Rogers. \u201cIt could be a \u2018this is my patch\u2019 to other males and also a \u2018look how strong and lovely I am\u2019 to the females.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s like they\u2019re saying, \u2018I\u2019m the biggest and the strongest, look how long and how loud I can sing,’\u201d said Chambers. <\/p>\n Features of leopard seal songs<\/p>\n To better understand how leopard seal songs compare to other species, the researchers analyzed entropy \u2013 essentially how repetitive or predictable a sound<\/a> sequence is.<\/p>\n They compared recordings from 26 male leopard seals to vocal sequences from humpback whales, bottlenose dolphins, squirrel monkeys, and several types of human music, including baroque, classical, romantic, contemporary, and Beatles songs.<\/p>\n What stood out was how closely the leopard seal songs matched the structure of nursery rhymes.<\/p>\n \u201cNursery rhymes are simple, repetitive and easy to remember \u2013 that\u2019s what we see in the leopard seal songs,\u201d said Chambers.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re not as complex as human music but they aren\u2019t random either. They sit in this sweet spot that allows them to be both unique and highly structured.\u201d<\/p>\n Each seal has its own signature song<\/p>\n The sound recordings analyzed in the study were from the 1990s, when Professor Rogers would bike across Antarctica to the ocean\u2019s edge, mark individual seals with dye, and return at night to record their songs.<\/p>\n \u201cThey sing at night, so I would mark them during the day and go back out at night to visit each of the seals to get recordings from different males,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n While all the seals use the same five calls, each male puts them in a distinct order \u2013 creating a kind of signature.<\/p>\n \u201cWe think it\u2019s a bit like each seal having its own name,\u201d explained Chambers. \u201cThey\u2019re all using the same alphabet of five sounds \u2013 but the way they combine them creates a pattern that\u2019s individually distinctive.\u201d<\/p>\n An evolving story <\/p>\n With today\u2019s tools, the researchers want to return to Antarctica and investigate what has changed.<\/p>\n According to Chambers, the next step is to use mathematical models to test whether leopard seals use their songs like dolphins use signature whistles \u2013 to announce individual identity.<\/p>\n \u201cWe want to know if new call types have emerged in the population,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd if patterns evolve from generation to generation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019d love to investigate whether their \u2018alphabet\u2019 of five sounds has changed over time.\u201d<\/p>\n It turns out that in the coldest, quietest places on Earth, animals are still finding ways to be heard \u2013 and remembered.<\/p>\n The full study was published in the journal Scientific Reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.\u00a0<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Leopard seals, some of the loneliest animals in Antarctica, may have more in common with us than we…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44917,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[49,48,66,323],"class_list":{"0":"post-44916","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44916\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44917"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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