text | Xu Rui
mentions the most "talented" creatures in the animal kingdom. People may think of songbirds, dolphins , including humans themselves. And turtles, which are "treacherous" in people's impression, may not be included.
But in fact, this charming reptile communicates through a large number of clicks, breathing and giggles. By recording the “sounds” of turtles and other animals considered quiet, scientists concluded that from birds to lion roars, all terrestrial vertebrate voices have a common origin, dating back more than 400 million years ago. Related research was published in Nature Communications on October 25.
A male Adabra turtle convinces the female to mate with it by making a "gurgle". Image source: DENNIS HANSEN
3, the University of Vienna, Austria, who was not involved in the study, said the findings suggest that animals began to voice early in evolutionary history, which even occurred before they had well-developed ears, which meant that the ears evolved to listen to these sounds.
Several years ago, John Wiens, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Arizona, and his graduate student Chen Zhuo (sound), began to study the evolutionary origins of sound communication (basically defined as the sounds made by animals with their mouths). Combining the scientific literature, the two prepared a genealogy of all vocal animals known at the time.
Scientists finally concluded that this vocalization ability appeared many times in vertebrates 200 million years ago to 100 million years ago. But Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, discovered the animal that was overlooked in Wiens et al.
At that time, Wiens and Chen Zhuo found that only two of the 14 turtle family animals were able to make sounds, but Jorgewich-Cohen found that more turtles could make sounds.
He spent two years recording the "talking" behavior of 50 species of turtles.
Jorgewich-Cohen and colleagues also discovered three organisms that were not known to make sounds before: a legless amphibian - caecilian , a New Zealand reptile similar to a lizard- beaked head lizard , a freshwater fish that can breathe air on the water surface, and a close relative of a terrestrial animal, lung fish.
"They do get some very unusual records from some unusual species," Fitch said.
Among the 53 species recorded by the Jorgewich-Cohen team, the fist-sized wood grain turtle that can be sold as pets can make more than 30 sounds, such as the squeaking sound of the courtship male turtle and the "crying" sound that only young turtles make.
Overall, some of the sounds it makes are related to offensiveness, and some seem to be greetings to new partners, usually accompanied by a swing of the head.
By adding the previously unknown sounds mentioned above to existing acoustic communication data, Jorgewich-Cohen and colleagues constructed a more comprehensive new acoustic evolution tree of approximately 1,800 species.
in the paper they pointed out that each branch of evolutionary tree contains vocal animals, which shows that vocal behavior evolved only once among the common ancestors of terrestrial animals and lung fish about 407 million years ago.
Currently, Jorgewich-Cohen and colleagues are recording how turtles and other quieter species use sounds and compare the sounds of terrestrial vertebrates and lungfish with those of other fish to see if the new acoustic evolutionary trees extend further in time.
Related paper information:
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-33741-8
