Leopard seals might not be the first animal that comes to mind when we think about singing, but new research suggests their songs may have more in common with us than we ever imagined. A study published in Scientific Reports found that the underwater singing of male leopard seals in Antarctica shares a remarkable structural similarity to the nursery rhymes humans sing to children.
Using data from analog recordings collected in the 1990s, researchers analyzed the calls of 26 individual male seals. They discovered that these solitary apex predators don’t just sing randomly, but follow a predictable, repetitive structure made up of five key sounds. While these calls are shared across a population, each male arranges them in his own distinct order, creating a unique sonic “name.”
“Leopard seal songs have a surprisingly structured temporal pattern,” said Lucinda Chambers, lead author of the study and Ph.D. candidate at the University of New South Wales, in a press release. “When we compared their songs to other studies of vocal animals and of human music, we found their information entropy — a measure of how predictable or random a sequence is — was remarkably close to our own nursery rhymes.”
