ORCAS and dolphins use a Kim Kardashian-like voice to catch prey, a new study has found.
The research was published in the journal Science on Thursday by scientists from the University of Southern Denmark.
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Researchers noted that toothed whales use at least three voice registers (like humans) to communicate and hunt.
“Registers basically means very distinct ways of vibrating the same vocal cords,” said Coen Elemans, professor of sound communication and behavior at the University of Southern Denmark and an author of the study, in an interview with Insider.
In humans, they are produced by sending air across the vocal folds in the larynx.
Three of the most used registers include the vocal fry, chest, and falsetto.
When we are speaking normally, we are using our chest register.
Vocal fry produces a frequency range lower than chest, while falsetto represents a higher frequency.
When it comes to hunting, toothed whales tend to use vocal fry – the same register often used by Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry.
The reason for this is that “during vocal fry, the vocal folds are only open for a very short time, and therefore it takes very little breathing air to use this register,” Elemans told The Independent.
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Toothed whales require little breathing air when they hunt because they dive as deep as 2,000 meters – where water pressure is high and the air is compressed.
What’s more, toothed whales have a larynx but it doesn’t produce sound as a human larynx does.
Instead, they evolved a “new structure that’s located in their nose that generates the sounds — what’s called phonic lips,” Elemans explained.
To capture this in action, Elemans and his team lowered an endoscope into the blowholes of a few trained, captive dolphins and porpoises.
The small camera was able to film the phonic lips at high speed and “show that there’s definitely movement of the [lips] while they make echolocation clicks,” Elemans told NPR.
The researchers’ second experiment required animals that had recently died, which Elemans called “really difficult.”
“Typically when they die, they sink. So it’s very hard to study their physiology because you don’t have access to fresh tissue,” he added.
However, the team was able to collect harbor porpoises that had died in the wild and then blew air across their phonic lips.
“What we’ve been able to show is that these phonic lips [are] not moved by muscle control like, for example, in cat purring,” Elemans said. “But instead, they’re made just like a human voice by airflow. And that’s a really striking parallel.”
Kelly Benoit-Bird, Science Chair at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute told NPR that this research is important because “it reconciles field observations of [toothed whale] sounds and laboratory studies of physiology with our understanding of the evolution of marine mammals to provide a clear, complete picture of how dolphins produce the wide repertoire of sounds that is critical for their survival.”
