Melodies of land and sea To understand how leopard seal songs compare to other species, Chambers and her co-authors looked at entropy—the measurement of how predictable or random a vocal sequence is.

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.

In a study published today, UNSW Sydney researchers found that the underwater songs of leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) in Antarctica share structural similarities with the nursery rhymes often sung ...