<
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-thought-these-animals-were-silent-scientists-just-found-their-voices>
'Commonly assumed to be silent, 53 animals have had their 'voices' added to a
family tree of vocalizations in an effort to determine when acoustic
communication emerged in evolutionary history.
The species that are finally being heard come from four different animal
clades, including 50 turtle species, the South American lungfish (
Lepidosiren
paradoxa), a limbless amphibian called Cayenne caecilian (
Typhlonectes
compressicauda), and a reptile from New Zealand known as a tuatara (
Sphenodon
punctatus).
"All recorded species were found to possess a varied acoustic repertoire
comprising a number of different sounds," the authors conclude.
The fact that so many species across the turtle tree of life share an ability
to make vocal sounds strongly suggests it is ancestral to the entire turtle
clade.
What's more, when researchers combined the turtle data with an analysis of
1,800 other vertebrates with lungs, they found evidence of a common origin of
sound production and acoustic communication across all animals in possession of
enough backbone to draw and exhale breath.
Compared to birds and mammals, amphibians and reptiles are far less studied,
but just because we don't have much data on their sound production, doesn't
mean they aren't making noise.
If we really want to understand how acoustic communication evolved, researchers
argue, we have to systematically document these "key, neglected groups".
This is exactly what the current study attempted to test. The authors only
searched for sound production among 106 neglected species, but they were still
able to find dozens of examples of acoustic communication in the available
literature. Even with such a limited sample size, the evolutionary origins of
animal sound suddenly grow much deeper.'
Via Rixty Dixet.
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
