Turtles purr like cats, croak like frogs, and even breathe like Darth Vader. No one really understan

• Turtles make a wide variety of sounds.
• Researcher Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen recorded surprising vocalizations from 50 turtle species.
• Listen to 13 of these seldom-heard turtle sounds, from croaking and squealing to cooing and purring.

Turtles have a reputation for being slow, steady, and quiet. If you listen closely, though, they're surprisingly noisy.

Gabriel Jorgewich-Cohen first realized this in the Brazilian Amazon, where he was conducting field work, when he watched a batch of baby turtles wriggle out of their nests. They were squeaking.

"That reminded me of tortoise sounds I heard while watching funny videos online and made me question how many turtle species out there are also making sounds," Jorgewich-Cohen, a researcher at the University of Zurich, told Insider via email.

So he rushed home to his 10 pet turtles and set them up with recording equipment he borrowed from another researcher. They were making sounds, too — like the creaking clicks in the clip below. Turn your volume up to hear it:

"My first reaction was to think it was a mistake, but the more I recorded the more I found. When I realized that these were actually turtle sounds I couldn't stop smiling," Jorgewich-Cohen said.

Soon he was recording turtle squeaks, croaks, and clicks in the lab, and trying to figure out when the reptiles were sounding off deliberately to communicate with each other.

There was an astonishing variety of noises. This one sounds like a record scratch:

Another turtle emitted a deep purr:

Even within the same species, the sounds varied. This clip from a snapping turtle sounds like a Darth Vader-style inhale:

While this snapping turtle sounds almost like a frog croaking:

Turtle sounds have been documented in writing as early as the 1970s, but Jorgewich-Cohen wanted to capture the range of these reptiles' vocalizations in audio recordings.

He also wanted to parse out involuntary noises, like burps, from sounds meant to communicate something to other turtles.

Jorgewich-Cohen recorded 50 different turtle species. To his surprise, each one was making sounds. He thinks vocal communication is widespread across turtles.

These findings were published in the journal Nature Communications in October 2022.

The sounds of not-so-silent creatures

Jorgewich-Cohen suspects that people don't notice turtle sounds very often because it's hard to hear them through water.

So he and his colleagues used underwater cameras to observe the turtles and see if their behaviors correlated to particular sounds.

"We also recorded them in different groupings whenever animals were available: females only, males only, juveniles only, and then combinations of those groups. This enabled us to check if there were sounds produced only in specific situations by different animals," he said.

In one example, a male spot-legged wood turtle made the creaking sound below while displaying courtship behavior, Jorgewich-Cohen said.

Two of Jorgewich-Cohen's red-footed tortoises, Arnaldo and Jojo, made this grunting sound while mating:

"Homer, Hulk, Carmelo and Clayton produced many different sounds," he said, including the click below. "In some cases they were fighting," he added.

For some of the turtle species, the researchers identified as many as 30 distinct sounds.

This one sounds a bit robotic:

This Malayan softshell turtle sounds like it's cooing:

While this one sounds like a radar blip in a movie:

The researchers even went back to sea turtles and captured their cries:

So next time you see a turtle, listen closely. It may be trying to tell you something.

This post has been updated. It was originally published on December 29, 2022.

Watch: Here's what you'll find inside a turtle's shell

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