Scientists have figured out when and why the animals began to use the voice
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Scientists have proved that the first vertebrates to vote had not. And for the first time the ability to produce sounds came from certain types of communication in the dark. On the results of a large-scale study reported by “Moscow 24” with reference to Nature Communications.
Scientists from the University of Arizona (USA) and the Diploma in University of Henan province (China) investigated the evolution of acoustic communication in animals over the past 350 million years.
They created the so-called evolutionary tree that includes 1800 species of major groups of vertebrates — birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and mammals. Scientists have consistently said to him, representatives of some species use sound as communication.
With the help of statistical and analytical methods for the study, researchers tried to find out whether there were sound communication in various species groups separately from each other, or was the result of evolution.
According to the study, the vertebrates did not use acoustic communication, and this ability appeared in the period between 100 and 200 million years ago. The first owners of such skills are those animals that are mainly nocturnal.
It is reported that as the representatives of different kinds of animals constantly exchange different kinds of information, in the dark time of the process is difficult to implement using color changes or body movements, so I had to use the voice.
The study”s authors believe that the species that currently are active mainly in the daytime, you can observe the relics of the night behavior of their ancestors. An example would be the pre-dawn roll call of songbirds.
In addition, the researchers found that the ability of the acoustic transmission of information did not give an evolutionary advantage and contributed to the emergence of new species in the groups of animals with a voice. This conclusion contradicts the generally accepted scientific point of view.
“If you look at the scale of millions of years, and within certain groups such as frogs and birds, the idea that acoustic communication leads to speciation, it works. But on the scale of 350 million years, it does not explain the discovered patterns of species diversity,” the researchers note.
As proof of their theory they cite the fact that birds and crocodiles use sound communication, but at the same time there are many thousands of species of birds and only a 25 — crocodiles.
However, the authors of the study nonetheless emphasize that the capacity for acoustic communication as an evolutionary trait that has shown itself to be extremely stable and has gradually become the main way of communication.