It’s called Ripper and it’s a very special musk duck . He lives in a nature reserve in Canberra and has been raised by humans. The characteristic that makes him almost, almost unique is his ability to insult in a human way . He drops “damn fool” in your face and it stays so wide. This is Ripper, or rather it was.
The case of Ripper, raised in the 80s, and who is also capable of imitating the sound of a door slamming has now been made public in a study on vocal learning in animals and humans that has been published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B.
For animal researchers this is an exciting find. “Acquiring vocalizations by learning them from other individuals is only known in a limited number of animal groups ,” write ethologists Carel ten Cate (University of Leiden) and Peter Fullagar in the publication.
Scientists don’t know exactly how the duck learned to say You bloody fool! , a typically Australian expression that comes across as “bloody fool” or “bloody idiot.” They think they heard it from their caretaker and learned it. “Ripper was raised from a fresh egg sourced from East Gippsland, Victoria, Australia, in September 1983, and was the only musk duck present at the time of hatching,” the researchers write in their paper. Unfortunately there are no more documents. They were lost in a forest fire that swept through the Tidbinbilla reserve in 2003.
At the same site, three years before the fire, in June 2000, another male musk duck ( Biziura lobata ) was recorded imitating a duck of another species , more specifically a black Pacific duck ( Anas superciliosa ). This animal was not raised by a keeper but by a captive female. As with Ripper, much of the documentation was lost in the fire. What is known is that both Ripper and the second duck did the imitations during their mating displays.
“These sounds have been described before, but have never been analyzed in detail and have until now been unnoticed by vocal learning researchers,” the researchers write. “Together with previous observations of vocal differences between populations and deviant vocalizations in captive-bred individuals , these observations demonstrate the presence of advanced vocal learning at a level comparable to that of songbirds and parrots.”
The couple of ethologists have also recorded the existence of other male musk ducks in the United Kingdom that, although they have not been registered, are capable of imitating human coughs, the snort of a pony and the squeak of a door.
Although the discoveries were made years ago, researchers have now become interested in them because very few animals are capable of mimicking vocal noises the way musk ducks did. Musk birds are related to birds that also imitate noise, such as parrots and songbirds.
Scientists believe musk birds can imitate noises because their telencephalon , the part of the brain associated with vocal learning in songbirds and parrots, is relatively larger in waterfowl than in other groups of birds.
“Vocal learning in the musk duck would represent a case of independent evolution , raising many questions ranging from the neural and behavioral mechanisms involved to the evolutionary and adaptive antecedents of vocal learning in this species,” the researchers write. “Therefore, the reported knockoffs require more extensive documentation and analysis.”
There is still much to investigate. As the researchers explain, it is not even known which living species are the most similar to the musk duck, although it is known that no other duck or bird has shown such capacity.
Fuente: ten Cate Carel and Fullagar Peter J. 2021, Vocal imitations and production learning by Australian musk ducks (Biziura lobata). Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B3762020024320200243. http://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0243
