Moreover 50 Animal Species Once Thought to be Silent Actually Communicate With VoiceAccording to a study published this week that suggests the trait may have evolved from a common ancestor more than 400 million years ago. Among these animals actually ‘talking’ turtles audibly.
The results were published in the journal Nature Communicationin an article attempting to unravel the evolutionary roots of this animal “voicing”: Analyzes show that this ability is at least as old as the last common ancestor of all living terrestrial vertebrates. 407 million years.
The use of these sounds as a source of communication is common among several vertebrate groups: birds chirping, frogs croaking or dogs barking are a few familiar examples and play a critical role in parental care, mate attraction, and a variety of other behaviors.
Despite its importance, Little is known about when and at what point this behavior emerged in the evolutionary history of vertebrates.. To find out, an international research team led by University of Zurich (UZH) According to the statement made by the center, the focus was on species that had never been reached before. Specifically, the study includes the following tests: 53 species from the four main classes of terrestrial vertebrates (turtles, tuatara, caecilians, and lungfish) in the form of sound recordings and contextual information about the behavior that accompanies sound production.
“This, along with an extensive literature-based dataset that includes 1,800 different species covering the entire spectrumshows that vocal communication is not only common in terrestrial vertebrates, but also demonstrates acoustic abilities in several groups previously considered nonvocal”, summarizes Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, first author of the paper.
For example, many turtles, those who think they are quiet, indeed shows broad and complex acoustic repertoires. To investigate the evolutionary origins of acoustic communication in vertebrates, the researchers combined data on vocalization abilities of species such as lizards, snakes, salamanders, amphibians and lungfish with phylogenetic trait reconstruction methods.
The study’s lead author, evolutionary biologist Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, told AFP.He had the idea to record the apparently silent species while researching turtles in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.
“When I got home, I decided to shoot my own pet,” said Jorgewich-Cohen, who began his experiments with Homer, a turtle he had owned since childhood.
Surprisingly, he discovered that Homer and the other turtles in his house were actually making sounds. So he started recording other turtle species, sometimes using a hydrophone, a microphone to record underwater.
combined with data from well-known acoustic clades such as mammals, birds Y frogsResearchers have succeeded in mapping vocal communication in the vertebrate tree of life. “We were able to reconstruct acoustic communication as a common feature among these animals that are at least as old as their last common ancestor living around them. 407 million years Before today”, explains Marcelo Sánchez, who led the study.
So far, the scientific consensus has supported a convergent origin of acoustic communication between vertebrates, because the morphology and sensitivity of the auditory apparatus and that of the vocal tract, quite different from each other. But the new results show that acoustic communication did not evolve multiple times in various branches, but instead has a common and ancient evolutionary origin.
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