What does the turtle say? The complex world of sounds made by turtles, lizards and fish

By Lauren Gilger
Published: Thursday, January 12, 2023 - 1:08pm

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Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen
Basil Minder
Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen

Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen, a Ph.D. student at University of Zurich, recently discovered that 50 species of turtle, as well as a species of lizard, caecilian and lungfish, have the ability to make sounds and communicate with each other via sound.

And that means they are a lot more like us than we might think. 

The Show talked with Jorgewich-Cohen about the discovery outlined in the paper he co-wrote, “Common evolutionary origin of acoustic communication in choanate vertebrates,” which was published in Nature Communications in 2022.

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