Male leopard seals are very enthusiastic singers when it comes time to woo a mate, and a new research discovered that their songs are much like these of human nursery rhymes.
Spring is a busy time for male leopard seals. It is mating season, and so they have a variety of singing to do. They’ll sing for 2 minutes, then go up for air for 2 minutes, and repeat the cycle for as much as 13 hours a day. It is nonetheless unknown whether or not they sing to draw feminine seals, warn off different males, or each.
Researchers from the College of New South Wales, Sydney, studied the recorded songs of twenty-six male leopard seals. They in contrast the “info entropy” or randomness within the songs to that of different animals and music composed by people, together with Mozart and the Beatles.
Leopard seals can solely produce 5 notes, to allow them to solely make their songs distinctive by the association of these notes. Accordingly, the songs they produce have decrease entropy than modern, classical, and baroque music, however increased than these of humpback whales or dolphins. The closest match within the research was nursery rhymes.
“Nursery rhymes are easy, repetitive and straightforward to recollect — that is what we see within the leopard seal songs …” lead writer Lucinda Chambers stated. Subsequent, researchers plan to develop mathematical fashions for leopard seal songs to find out if people have their very own distinctive songs, much like these of bottlenose dolphins.
Beforehand:
• US governmental conservationists actually hope that younger endangered seals will cease getting eels caught of their nostrils
• Seal slaps kayaker in his face with an octopus
• A seal strikes on land by ‘galumphing’
