A new study suggests seal pups sound more human than you might expect – with the animals adjusting their calls to match their neighbours and even taking turns “speaking”.
The findings offer new clues about how complex communication, including human language, may have evolved.
Only a handful of animals are capable of learning new vocal sounds, but harbour seals (also known as common seals) are one of them.
“They can learn to produce new sounds and modify existing ones,” said Dr Koen de Reus from Radboud University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel to BBC Science Focus. De Reus led the study as part of his PhD.
Chatty harbour seals each have their own unique calls. Mothers use these sounds to locate their pups on the often-crowded beaches. The research examined how else the seals might adjust these vocalisations, depending on the social situation.
For instance, de Reus found that the calls of pups sitting next to each other grew increasingly similar over time.
“This could be compared with regional accents in humans,” he said. “Despite sounding more similar, they still remain individually recognisable – just like humans!”
The pups also take turns when communicating to avoid overlapping each other, just like polite humans do when having a conversation.
For the study, de Reus listened to thousands of hours of audio, recorded from dozens of harbour seal pups at the Pieterburen Seal Centre in the Netherlands.
“After all those hours with the pups, I could also recognise at least half the calls,” said de Reus.
By identifying which aspects of communication are common among other species – and which are uniquely human – the research hopes to aid in unravelling the complex history of how our own language evolved.
“Language is often thought to be what makes us unique and sets us apart from other species, but I wanted to show that there are other species out there that have developed advanced communication systems,” said de Reus. “Consider it a proof-of-concept or a baseline from which we can now start making comparisons.”
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