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Lucinda Chambers, PhD Candidate in Marine Bioacoustics, UNSW Sydney

Rockabye baby: the ‘love songs’ of lonely leopard seals resemble human nursery rhymes

CassandraSm/Shutterstock

Late in the evening, the Antarctic sky flushes pink. The male leopard seal wakes and slips from the ice into the water. There, he’ll spend the night singing underwater amongst the floating ice floes.

For the next two months he sings every night. He will sing so loudly, the ice around him vibrates. Each song is a sequence of trills and hoots, performed in a particular pattern.

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