Overview

• Male leopard seals arrange a shared set of five notes into unique sequences, singing in two-minute underwater cycles for up to 13 hours a day during the spring breeding season.
• Entropy analysis published in Scientific Reports shows their song patterns are as predictable as human nursery rhymes and more structured than whale or dolphin calls but less complex than music by the Beatles or Mozart.
• Scientists theorize the repetitive structure evolved to maximize long-range underwater transmission, helping males attract potential mates and ward off rivals across vast Antarctic sea ice.
• The study reanalyzed analog hydrophone recordings from the 1990s of 26 seals off Eastern Antarctica using modern bioacoustic metrics.
• Researchers plan follow-up field and analytical studies to map how male song patterns change over generations and to uncover the function of occasional female vocalizations.