Turtles may never take top place among the animal kingdom’s most prolific vocalizers, but it turns out that they do indeed have something to say. In a new study published October 25 in Nature Communications, researchers found that turtles, along with other understudied animals, do in fact communicate using a diverse repertoire of vocal sounds. The study’s authors suggest that their finding may push the origins of acoustic communication back in time to the common ancestor of all lunged vertebrates.
Prior to the current study, many of the included species “were considered to be mute,” Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, a doctoral candidate at the University of Zurich, tells Scientific American. By listening carefully to recordings from 53 species—including turtles, lungfish, caecilians (a group of limbless amphibians), and New Zealand’s endemic, lizard-like tuatara—the team reached a different conclusion: that vocalization is more widespread than previously thought, and that “the sounds that turtles are ...
