[Animals] "Damn fool!": Australian musk ducks learn to insult like humans

[FNX Magokiler]

A small number of animals, especially birds - such as songbirds and parrots - can learn to imitate other animals, including humans.

Now, scientists have revealed the peculiar case of an Australian musk duck that learned to say in English "you bloody fool" ("damn fool"), most likely from a former keeper.

The research, published in a special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, has shown that ducks can mimic the sounds of other birds and human sounds, such as doors slamming and a truly Australian phrase spoken by their keepers. . Also, look at how some of these particular species of ducks ended up with that trait.

"Acquiring vocalizations by learning them from other individuals is only known in a limited number of animal groups," write the ethologists Carel ten Cate (University of Leiden) and Peter Fullagar in their new work.

“Here we provide evidence of vocal learning in a member of a basal clade of the avian phylogeny: the Australian musk duck (Biziura lobata).

The Ripper Duck

One of the ducks, Ripper, was raised by hand in the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, southwest of Australia's capital Canberra, in the 1980s, and learned to remarkably mimic the sound of a door slam, as well as the phrase which sounds a lot like "damn dumb", as reported by ScienceAlert.

 

 

Although scientists don't know exactly how Ripper would have learned to pronounce the phrase, they speculate that it was probably something the keeper said about him, and the bird learned it.

According to The Independent, recordings of Ripper making these sounds were made on a Sony Walkman Professional cassette recorder and Sennheiser MKH 816 microphone on July 19 and 26, 1987, when the bird was about four years old.

In these recordings, made by retired Australian scientist Peter J Fullager, the duck could be heard vocalizing dozens of times in a few minutes and at intervals of four to five seconds.

Duck 2
In 2000, the researchers also recorded the calls of another male musk duck, known simply as "Duck 2".

Duck 2, raised in Tidbinbilla by a captive female, could imitate the sounds of the Pacific black duck. It also emitted a sound similar to that of Ripper's slamming doors.

"This second duck had been exposed to Ripper, which may have affected this part of the sound," write Cate and Fullargar in their article.

"Unfortunately, all of the Tidbinbilla documents were lost in the forest fire that swept through the reserve in January 2003, so it is difficult to establish all the exact details," the study notes.

The authors point out that this is the first test of vocal learning in a member of the Anserinae family (ducks, geese and swans).

"The Australian musk duck demonstrates an unexpected and impressive vocal learning ability," they write in their article.

Telencephalon
Scientists say the brain region of birds known as the telencephalon, which is involved in vocal learning in songbirds and parrots, is also relatively larger in waterfowl than in other groups of birds, The Independent reports.

Similarly, they speculate that the vocal learning trait may have once evolved in the common ancestor of these birds and later been lost in some lineages.

"These sounds have been described before, but have never been analyzed in detail and have until now gone unnoticed by vocal learning researchers," the researchers write in the study.

"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 background of vocal learning in this species," the scientists wrote in the research.

The experts also advocated "a broader and more systematic study of this and other related species", stating that it could help to better understand how animals learn to make sounds.