But what a fly had dive Jean de La Fontaine’s hare? Still going to mock the slowness of the turtle, but deal with “gossip”! The naturalists are however formal: the turtles remain silent. At least we thought it until October 25. In an article published in the journal nature Communications , an international team claims to have highlighted “acoustic communication” in no less than fifty species of celonians, their scientific name. A big step in the knowledge of this reptile order. A jump in understanding the origins of sound communication in vertebrates.
For Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, it all started with the observation of his own domestic turtles and the desire to go dig behind their shell. Among the questions that tap him then, there are these little sounds that he perceives. A study trip to the Amazon completes to convince the student of the University of Zurich (Switzerland) that he held a subject of importance there. He will devote his thesis to the distribution of “acoustic communication” among the three hundred and ten species listed.
To cover the entire spectrum, the zoologist selects fifty, freshwater, sea and land. “Many are rare and threatened,” he said. So there is no question of going to disturb their habitat. Even less to take them to isolate them and make sure that the raised sounds do not come from elsewhere. It is therefore a real world tour of the institutions to which he engages for two years.
The result is impressive: in all the species studied, his team has highlighted acoustic signals. More or less frequent, more or less powerful, but “each recorded species has produced sounds”. What to conclude that all turtles vocalize? “I would be very surprised that we discover that some do not do it,” says the researcher.
appearance in a common ancestor
The team went beyond. First, it recorded three species cousins of turtles: a lung fish named Dipneuste; a tuatara, a kind of New Zealand lizard; And a Cécilie, an amphibian without legs. All sounds again. Finally, the researchers took up the literature and more particularly the data relating to 1,799 species of tetrapods gathered in 2020 by John Wiens, of the University of Arizona. In an article published in the same review , at the end of a methodical phylogenetic analysis, the biologist concluded that acoustic communication had appeared in parallel, on several occasions, in these different groups, 100 to 200 million years ago.
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