Dr. Laela Sayigh

We know in Sarasota, the population that I study, that about a third of the calves end up developing whistles that are pretty similar to their moms.

I was actually just looking at one yesterday that was literally identical to his mom, although that's not very common at all.

And in fact, more common is for them to not develop whistles like their moms.

And we have no idea why some do and some don't.

And yeah, anyway, questions that I would love to know the answers to.

That's a great question too.

Well, so for the most part, they are unique.

Usually at the very least, there's some subtle difference that we can use to differentiate one animal from another.

Like it might end up going in an upsweep versus a down, something like that, even if the rest of it looks the same.

Although occasionally we do run into these very unusual situations like the calf that I was just mentioning that really developed a whistle that is so similar to his mom that we can't distinguish it.

At least we can't.

It's possible that there are some features that enable them to.

But usually the distinctions are pretty visible to us.

Like we can see really big differences among the whistles for the most part.

Seen evidence for that, although I wouldn't say that we have really looked specifically for that.

They do vary aspects of their whistles in ways that make actually classifying their whistles a bit complicated.

I guess other than one exception there, which I might just mention, we did look at the signature whistles of the adult females when they were communicating with their cats.

calves versus not with their calves, with other animals.

And in that study, we did find that they tended to increase the maximum frequency of their whistles when they were communicating with their calves.

And that was something that we likened to human motherese, which was, you know, when we speak with infants and small children and we speak in a more kind of sing-songy type high-pitched voice,