COSMOS MAGAZINE
Leopard seals have massive heads, powerful jaws and distinctive spotted coats, earning them a fierce reputation as one of the top predators stalking the Antarctic.
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But did you know they’re also incredibly talented singers?
Credit: Fiona Anderson
A new study published in Scientific Reports shows these “songbirds of the Southern Ocean” belt out tunes which share remarkable structural similarities with human nursery rhymes.
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Leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) live and hunt alone.
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But in the southern hemisphere’s spring, males put on performances from late October to early January to entice females.
In Eastern Antarctica, they busk for hours each day. It’s done in cycles, with 2 minutes spent on underwater opera and 2 minutes catching their breath on free-floating sea ice, also known as pack ice.
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Credit: Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 4.0
The songs aren’t random riffs. They’re made up of 5 distinct calls – high double trills, medium single trills, low descending trills, low double trills and a hoot with a low single trill – which are arranged in unique sequences.