Common seal pups communicate in ways that are more similar to humans than previously thought. For instance, they take turns when "speaking" and their calls become increasingly alike when they spend time around each other. This is shown by research conducted by biologist Koen de Reus (affiliated with the Max Planck Institute), who will defend his Ph.D. thesis on this topic at Radboud University and Vrije Universiteit Brussel on 20 February. For his study, he and his colleagues recorded more than 1,000 hours of audio from seal pups in Pieterburen.
