Leopard seal song patterns have similar predictability to nursery rhymes

During their breeding season, male leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) spend hours perfecting their solo performance: singing unique sequences of stereotyped calls underwater to create their ‘song’. These song bouts are made up of discrete call types common across leopard seals within a region, which begs the question – what determines the individually unique patterns of these calls? Information entropy quantifies the amount of randomness in a sequence, providing insight into the statistical patterns governing a sequence. The songs produced by 26 different Eastern Antarctic leopard seals have more predictable temporal structure than humpback whale songs and dolphin whistle sequences. The estimated information entropy of the leopard seal songs is comparable to nursery rhymes but unsurprisingly, lower than contemporary, classical, and baroque music. The greater structure of the leopard seal’s song improves the ability of distant listeners to accurately receive signals and identify singers, ..., , # Data from: Leopard seal song patterns have similar predictability to nursery rhymes

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.tdz08kq9b](10.5061/dryad.tdz08kq9b)

## Description of the data and file structure

Recordings were made from November to January, in 1992 to 1994, and 1997 to 1998, in the Davis Sea, Eastern Antarctica (from 68'25'S, 77'10'E to 68'35'S, 77'50'E). Recordings were made on 45-minute tapes with a Sony WMD6C audio-cassette recorder, a Brüel and Kjær 8103 hydrophone, and a custom preamplifier, and this system had a frequency response from 35 to 15 000 Hz 3 dB. The hydrophone was deployed 6m below the surface of the water. The dataset contains txt files of annotated leopard seal sequences in symbolic code and MATLAB files for analysis. .txt files are named according to an individual seal ID code assigned to an individual male seal observed during the field study.

### Files and variables

#### File: AnnotatedLeopardSealSequences.zip

**Description:** .txt files of symbolic code d..., ,