A scientist has recently discovered that sea turtles that we thought to be silent are indeed communicating with each other.
Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen is a
Ph.D. student at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. After reading about a
turtle in the Amazon making noises, Jorgewich-Cohen decided to record his pet
turtle to see if he could hear sounds. Remarkably, he did and then began his
project.
In his studies, he used
microphones, video equipment, and a hydrophone, which is essentially a
microphone that is meant for underwater usage, to record a variety of species,
like sea turtles, lungfish, caecilian, and tuatara. He primarily focused his
research on turtles, studying 50 turtles out of the 53 animals recorded.
Listen to 13 of these
seldom-heard turtle sounds, from croaking and squealing to cooing and purring. Turtles
have a reputation for being slow, steady, and quiet. If you listen closely,
though, they're surprisingly noisy.
"My first reaction was to
think it was a mistake, but the more I recorded the more I found. When I
realized that these were actually turtle sounds I couldn't stop smiling,"
Jorgewich-Cohen said.
The turtles would communicate
when they wanted to mate or call each other from inside their eggs to
synchronize their hatching time. “If they call from inside, they all come out
together and hopefully avoid being eaten,” Jorgewich-Cohen said about sea
turtles singing from inside of their eggs.
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