They learned that 99% of the vocalizations that they recorded fell into 3 types of sound.And because each recording was attached to an observation of the manatee's behavior at the time of the call, they were able to relate certain noises with specific behaviors.And that’s how they started to make sense of the chatter.The squeal, or..., was the top call recorded during cavorting, or social play and frisky behavior.Stressed out manatees almost exclusively produced this noise, which is described by Brady and her team as the squeak.This call, the high squeak, was mostly used between a mother manatee and her calf.The findings were published in the journal Marine Mammal Science.This new information is useful in a lot of different ways.Manatees are what's known as a "keystone species."This means that by better understanding how this one species is doing, researchers can infer a lot more about the overall health of the coastal Florida ecosystem.Case in point, there's a lot of seagrass missing from over in the Indian River Lagoon area and a lot of manatees unfortunately perishing due to this.But sea grasses are also important for other species, you have sport and game fish, who use seagrass beds for those or juvenile nurseries.You have other animals, such as sea horses who use that, and it's food for turtles as well.
