Elephant seals do not forget their enemies. We be taught in regards to the nice beasts’ huge beefs and why they matter.
JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Elephant seals are enormous, grey and blubbery. They’ve an enormous snout and a really distinctive voice.
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SUMMERS: However regardless of the plain variations, elephant seals even have one thing in widespread with people – they do not neglect their enemies. Researchers from the College of California, Santa Cruz say male elephant seals keep in mind their competitors from earlier breeding seasons. Caroline Casey offered this analysis at a latest convention in Hawaii and joins us now. Hello there.
CAROLINE CASEY: Hello there. Thanks for having me.
SUMMERS: Thanks for being right here. So Caroline, I do know you’ve got been learning seals for greater than a decade, so I simply wish to begin off with an excellent primary query. What makes an elephant seal completely different from different seals?
CASEY: Oh, my gosh. I imply, for me, elephant seals are one of the crucial wonderful animals within the animal kingdom. However amongst seals they’re, , a few of the deepest divers of any seals. They’re one of many largest of all of the seal species. They’re essentially the most sexually dimorphic, that means that males look completely different than females. And to me, they’ve one of the crucial fascinating breeding methods.
SUMMERS: Fascinating. OK, so how did you uncover that elephant seals keep in mind the calls of their rivals?
CASEY: Yeah. This can be a actually long-term research that me and my colleagues have been evaluating for the previous 13 years at Ano Nuevo State Park, positioned in California. So at that web site, we monitor particular person male seals. As soon as they arrive on the breeding seashores – , elephant seals go on these wonderful foraging migrations, they usually spend most of their life at sea. However annually, they arrive again to the identical websites yearly to breed. And the males arrive first, they usually combat for entry to breeding alternatives. So as soon as they arrive, our colleagues and I begin monitoring them. And now we have simply found so many wonderful issues about them, together with the truth that they’ve these distinctive voices. We have accomplished a lot of experiments that exhibit that every male has a novel voice or title…
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CASEY: …That they be taught and keep in mind throughout the breeding season to chop down on the prices related to combating as a result of they do not wish to be combating on a regular basis, however they should keep in mind who each other is. And so to try this, they mainly have names.
SUMMERS: Are you able to discuss a bit bit about the way you performed this analysis and the way you particularly labored with these distinctive sounds that elephant seals make?
CASEY: Yeah, certain. So from our earlier analysis, we knew that males will reply deferentially relying on the dominance standing of the caller. So, for instance, if a male inside a season hears his most dominant rival, he’ll run away, even within the absence of the male being there themselves. And if he hears his most subordinate rival, he’ll typically assault or go in the direction of the speaker or the sound. And so we might monitor males at – in – throughout one yr we might file his most acquainted dominant rivals, after which we might attempt to discover him once more the subsequent yr and play again the sounds of his acquainted rivals.
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CASEY: And what we needed to know was – are these males responding the identical means that they might have within the earlier yr or is the whole lot being reset or they do not possibly recall these indicators over time? So these had been the forms of questions that we had been asking.
SUMMERS: I wish to ask, do you’ve got a favourite, like, particular person seal?
CASEY: Sure. You performed him initially of your intro, and I am so blissful you probably did (laughter). It is X579.
SUMMERS: X579 – that is his title?
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CASEY: Sure, that is his title. And he has such a novel name, and he simply was one among these males that got here again yearly. He began out as, like, this type of subordinate, not very dominant male, labored his means up the dominance hierarchy after which was a dominant male for 3 years, three consecutive seasons. So he is simply this, like, unimaginable success story. So few males ever get to breed. You already know, lower than 5% of males born ever attain breeding standing or turn into what we name alpha males. And so he is simply – I cherished him. He was nice.
SUMMERS: That is Caroline Casey, a analysis scientist on the College of California, Santa Cruz. Thanks a lot.
CASEY: Yeah, thanks for having me.
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