According to Brady, manatees are generally shy, gentle creatures that can be difficult to approach in the wild and therefore, tough to really study.Īll in all, Brady and her team spent about seven years recording manatee vocalizations.
hence, their affectionate nickname, the "sea cow". They spend a lot of time grazing in shallow waters. they change the pitch of the sound and the structure of the sound just a little bit to convey different meanings.Īshleigh Papp: Manatees are solitary marine herbivores. kind of like the way a house pet lets you know that they're not into that new brand of food, or they're really happy to see you at the end of a long day.īeth Brady: If you have a dog or a cat, you can tell by the way your cat meows, or your dog barks, whether or not it wants to go outside, whether it wants to play, but they're still using that bark, or just that meow. She says that manatees use vocalizations to convey all sorts of things. And while previous research has documented the noises, new work l looked into connecting how manatee chatter in the wild is related to behavior in different social settings.īeth Brady, a marine mammalogist at the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium in Florida ran the new research. They use their voices for talking to each other–and probably not for echolocating, like dolphins do. We know that manatees produce vocalizations via the vocal folds in their throat, similar to how humans and other mammals produce noise.
Cow sounds how to#
And researchers are starting to learn how to decode this crazy high-pitched chatter. That's what manatees sound like when they're communicating in the warm, shallow waters around Florida. Did you guess that they were from a blubbery, 10-foot long sea cow, otherwise known as a manatee? If you didn't get it, don't be too hard on yourself. If you had to guess, what would you say made those sounds?.
Ashleigh Papp: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science, I'm Ashleigh Papp.Īshleigh Papp.
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