You won’t miss one of Australia’s musk ducks if you see it. The name comes from the smell of musk flowing through the ducks during the breeding season and the males have a large black lobe below the beak.
But if the musk duck you pass by is called Ripper, the other dead gift is … swearing. With human words. For animal researchers, this is an exciting finding and new research has looked at how some of these particular species of ducks ended this trait.
“Acquiring vocalizations by learning them from other individuals is only known from a limited number of animal groups,” ethologists Carel ten Cate (Leiden University) and Peter Fullagar write in their new article.
“Here, we provide evidence for vocal learning in a member of a basal clade of avian phylogeny: the Australian musk duck (Lobby life). “
A duck – Ripper – was raised by hand in the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, southwest of the Australian capital, Canberra, in the 1980s, and learned to remarkably mimic the sound of a crashing door (can be heard below), as well as a phrase that sounds a lot like “stupid idiot.”
Researchers are unaware of how Ripper learned this particularly Australian phrase, although they believe it would probably be something his janitor would say and the bird learned to repeat it.
“The Ripper was bred from a fresh egg from East Gippsland, Victoria, Australia, in September 1983 and was the only musk duck present at the time of breeding,” the researchers write in their paper.
“Unfortunately, all of Tidbinbilla’s documents were lost in the gunpowder that swept the reserve in January 2003, making it difficult to establish all the exact details.”
Fifteen years later, a second duck – also male – also lived in Tidbinbilla, but was raised by a female in captivity, rather than a human caretaker. It was recorded in June 2000 sounding like a completely different duck: a black Pacific duck (Anas superciliosa). Unfortunately, much of the information about this duck was also lost in the same fire.
Still, we know that both ducks would use these imitation noises during their mating displays. (Can you imagine the mixture of noise and smell of musk?)
These fascinating events happened quite some time ago, but researchers have presented this case as part of a special issue of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B focusing on “vocal learning in animals and humans.”
“These sounds have been described before, but they were never analyzed in detail and went so unnoticed by vocal learning researchers,” the researchers write.
“Along with previous observations of vocal differences between populations and deviated vocalizations in captive-bred individuals, these observations demonstrate the presence of advanced vocal learning at a level comparable to that of songbirds and parrots.”
The pair of ethologists also point to a number of other unregistered musk ducks in the UK that have mimicked human coughing, a snoring pony and the squeak of a tourniquet.
The reason researchers are interested now is because very few animals can mimic vocal noises as these musk ducks might do. Nutmegs are the only living member of their genus and are closely related to other birds that can mimic noises such as songbirds and parrots.
So why can the musk duck imitate? Interestingly, the part of the brain associated with vocal learning in songbirds and parrots, the telencephalon, is also relatively larger in waterfowl than in other groups of birds.
Although not entirely certain, researchers suspect that the musk duck evolved its ability to mimic separately into other mimetic species because these birds are close to the trunk of the evolutionary tree of birds, it is a that is, if it evolved once very early within these, the capacity it should have has been lost many times since. So it would make more sense for it to evolve separately sometimes.
“Vocal learning in the musk duck would represent a case of independent evolution, which would raise many questions ranging from the neural and behavioral mechanisms involved to the evolutionary and adaptive antecedents of vocal learning in this species,” the researchers write. .
“Therefore, the reported imitations require more extensive documentation and analysis.”
There is still much more research to do. As the researchers explain, we don’t even know which living species are closest to the musk duck, although we do know that no other duck or bird has demonstrated this ability.
Until we find out more about this amazing species, in the words of the Ripper Duck, we are bloody fools.
The research has been published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B (link not yet published at the time of publication).