Elephant seals can recognize the voices of their rivals

Elephant seals spend most of their lives at sea, returning to shore just twice every year to molt and breed. The breeding season typically includes males weighing thousands of kilograms violently clashing with each other to compete for females. New research finds the hefty mammals remember the voices of rivals they’ve met before and retreat if they hear recordings of a more dominant seal. “An elephant seal call is like a drumbeat and each male s drumbeat is unique,” Carolyn Casey, a research scientist with the University of California Santa Cruz, U.S., who led the study, told Mongabay in a video call.

Casey recently presented her team’s finding at a joint meeting of the Acoustical Society of America and Acoustical Society of Japan. The study will soon be submitted for publication. Casey has been running a long-term study on elephant seals (Mirounga angustirostris) in California’s Año Nuevo State Park for 16 years. In that time, her team has collected a mountain of data on the seals, and Casey said a pattern began to emerge.

“It seemed as though males would listen to the call of a rival and then decide to attack or retreat based on the information that was contained within that signal,” she said. In 2015, the team conducted a study that found males can recognize “their rivals within a season … deciding to attack or retreat based on that individual s dominant status,” Casey said.

The next question the researchers had was whether the pinnipeds could remember their rivals’ voices the following breeding season....This article was originally published on Mongabay