Above the water, they sound like shaking Wookies. Beneath the ice, they sound like chippers, chattering robots. Anyway, Waddell Seal Finding work in Antarctica’s upcoming “Star Wars” project should be no problem.
“The Waddle Seal’s calls create an almost unbelievable, other cosmopolitan soundscape under the ice,” said Paul L. Cezico, a visiting professor at the University of Oregon and lead author of the new study describing the strange seal sounds. Said in a statement. “It really feels like you’re in the middle of ‘Star Wars’, ‘laser beam and space warfare all over.’
C: You have to be an alien (or a droid) to hear them; All those scientific sounds are completely inaudible to the human ear. Two years after Zico and his colleagues heard the Waddell seal, they were able to find other global voices (Leptonichots Wadley) With a special hydrophone (underwater microphone) installed AntarcticaNo McMordo Sound in 2017.
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Before researchers began recording, scientists knew about the 34 seal calls that make up the human ear. Now, the team’s research – published online on December 18th The Journal of the Acoustic Society of America – Nine new types of ultrasonic coils have been added to the seal repository. Those sounds include trills, whistles, and alien-sounding chips, sometimes composed of multiple harmonious tones.
Researchers have noted that humans hear in the sonic range of 20 to 20,000 Hz (or 20 kHz). Most of the newly emitted seal sounds exceeded 21 kHz, some continuously increased to 30 kHz. A high-level sprinkler reached an annoying 49.8 kHz level, and when the seal harmonizes multiple tones, the resulting noise could exceed 200 kHz, the team wrote. (It’s better than a hearing range of cats, dogs and some Bat.)
What about all these high-frequency messages? Researchers are not sure; So far, scientists have never been able to detect sound in seals (or any other winged mammals, such as sea lions or vultures). According to Zico, “Voice can only be a bonus communication element to stand on all low-frequency sounds, such as switching to a different channel for communication.”
It is theoretically possible that sounds are included in the echolocation, the biological sonar that employs animals such as dolphins and bats to find their way around dark spaces. But so far, there is no evidence that seals use echolocation, the researchers said. The team added that this behavior cannot be outside the expression of seals that can dive more than 1,900 feet (600 meters) underwater and hunt in the darkness of the Antarctic winter.
Let’s see if Wookie tries it.
Published on Original Living Science.
