Before starting to read the article, we suggest that you think about which animals you know that can learn and imitate vocalizations of other species. Do you have it? Well, here’s the answer: to date, this fascinating behavior has been described in songbirds, parrots, and some hummingbirds; And as you can guess from the title of the article, now a kind of duck is included.
Researcher Carel ten Cate, from the University of Leiden, was speechless when he came across evidence of vocal learning in the musk duck ( Biziura lobata ), an endemic mallard of Australia. This ability had not yet been described in waterfowl.
After studying 34-year-old recordings of a captive-bred musk duck named Ripper, he published an article in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. “When I first heard and saw the report that I was mimicking a human voice, I thought: is this a hoax? I could not believe it. It would be, it is, so unexpected for a species of this group, that it is considered quite primitive… Vocal learning is considered a fairly advanced trait, something that would not be present in any representative of these groups; I couldn’t believe it, ”says ten Cate in an interview for The Scientist .
As a curiosity, the Ripper duck was able to say “ you bloody fool ”, which in English means “you are a bloody stupid.” If you don’t believe it, you can listen to it in this video:
Vocal learning is a skill in which animals and humans learn sounds from their experiences. They imitate what they hear around them, which will generally be the parents, but can also be other individuals or even other species. If they don’t get that kind of exposure, they won’t be able to produce species-specific vocalizations or, in the human case, speech sounds or use appropriate language.
The conclusion of the study is that vocal learning in birds evolved in several groups independently, rather than evolving just once and getting lost. “When you look at the brains of vocal learners like parrots and songbirds, and also hummingbirds, they have a special circuit in the brain dedicated to vocal learning, which shows similarities between these different species. But the brain nuclei that evolved to focus on learning in these species, as far as I know, are not present, or, if they are, are highly underdeveloped or different, in ducks and geese. Therefore, it would be very interesting to see what is happening in your brain, and to know what is the neural architecture that in this case allows vocal learning. That can also tell us something about the options animals have in general to develop these kinds of skills and if there are different ways to reach the same end point, “concludes ten Cate for The Scientist.
References:
ten Cate, C., & Fullagar, P. J. (2021). Vocal imitations and production learning by Australian musk ducks (Biziura lobata). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 376(1836). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0243
Wilcox, C. (2021, September 8). Talking Duck Stuns Animal Behavior Researcher. The Scientist Magazine®. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/talking-duck-stuns-animal-behavior-researcher-69159
