Gabriel JorgewichCohen says his recordings of 53 marine species are changing our knowledge of the evolution of sounds.
A scientist studied 53 aquatic creatures thought to be silent. And he found that they can actually communicate.
Gabriel JorgewichCohen points out that these creatures always gave their messages, but humans never thought to hear them.
He used microphones to record species, including turtles, and communicate that they were about to mate or were hatching. And their findings rewrite some of what we know about evolution.
They point out that all vertebrates that breathe through their noses and use sound to communicate descended from a common ancestor that lived 400 million years ago.
There is a heated debate in evolutionary biology as to whether living things descended from a single ancestor or from multiple different origins.
JorgewichCohen is a PhD student at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and began working on the hypothesis that marine animals can communicate through sound. He used audio and video equipment to record 53 species in captivity around the world, including Chester Zoo in England. These included 50 turtles, a tuatara, a lungfish and a blind snake.
These animals were thought to be silent, but JorgewichCohen suggests they weren’t heard because they are difficult to spot.
“We know the song of a bird. You don’t need anyone to know what it is. But some of these animals are very quiet or make a noise every other day,” he told BBC News.
JorgewichCohen also suggests that humans prefer creatures that live on land and therefore ignore aquatic species.
Videos of the animals recorded when they make sounds allowed him to associate the sounds with specific behaviors and distinguish them from random sounds that don’t convey messages.
“Sea turtles sing from inside the eggs to synchronize hatching,” he says. “If they call from inside [dos ovos]they all come out together and it’s easier to avoid getting eaten.”
Tuatara make noises to prevent other animals from invading their territory.
Image: Getty Images
The researcher claims that turtles also make noises to indicate they want to mate. It displays videos of the turtles’ mating sounds, which are popular on social media.
JorgewichCohen also recorded sounds of tuataras ? a New Zealand species of reptile to protect their territory. He then analyzed what the discovery reveals about the evolution of animals that make sounds.
Fossils often don’t “tell” scientists enough about animals that lived millions of years ago. Therefore, they compare the behavior of living animals.
Using a technique known as phylogenetic analysis, JorgewichCohen traced the relationship between soundproducing animals.
The technique compares the behavior of a species and depicts it like a family tree. For example, if a human and a chimpanzee behave by making sounds, this suggests that the common ancestor of the two species also made sounds.
The researcher concluded that all vertebrate acoustic communication descended from a common ancestor 400 million years ago — during the Devonian period, when most species lived underwater.
This conclusion contradicts recent research, which traced communication through sound to several different ways 200 million years ago.
According to research, water snakes can also “talk”.
Image: Patrick Viana
Biologist Catherine Hobaiter, who was not involved in the research, told BBC News the recordings of these 53 species have been well received and are expanding our knowledge of acoustic communication.
“Comparing species like chimpanzees and humans only takes us back a few million years,” she explains. “We need to look at how commonalities between much more distant relatives extend our understanding to hundreds of millions of years.”
The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.
This text was published at https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/geral63410505