The thunderous roar of the MGM lion has opened Hollywood films for nearly a century. That iconic sound has conditioned us to hear the big cat’s call in a specific way. It’s a booming blast that announces power and presence. But the real soundscape of a lion pride is far more intricate than what you hear at the movies, new research shows. And this finding challenges decades-old assumptions about lions.
Scientists used machine-learning techniques to analyze field recordings of lions in Africa.
They found that African lions (Panthera leo) produce two distinct roars. There’s the familiar, guttural one that anchors a roaring bout. It carries vocal signatures that are unique to each animal. But they also found an overlooked “intermediary” roar. It’s shorter and lower-pitched than the classic full-throated type.
Biologists long have known that a lion’s roar helps advertise territory. It also attracts mates and helps pride members locate each other. A complete roaring bout begins with moans and ends with grunts. But scientists had treated everything in the middle as a single roar.
The new data let biologists separate that roar into its parts. And it might help train artificial intelligence (AI) to tell the voice of one lion from the next. That could let conservation groups count and track lions by sound alone.
“The new work makes the technique easier to understand and implement by non-specialists,” Karen McComb says. She did not take part in the new study. But her work at the University of Sussex in England focuses on how lions and other animals talk to each other and how they think.
As lion habitat has been shrinking and more people have been killing these big cats, they’ve declined by 90 percent through their historic range, says Jonathan Growcott. Being able to identify a lion by its roar could allow you to count them. A conservation technologist and large-carnivore biologist, Growcott works at the University of Exeter in England.
What lions might be saying with the newly identified intermediary roar remains unknown. “Unfortunately, we don’t speak lion,” Growcott says. “There is no option of ‘lion’ on Duolingo.”
His team shared its new roar discovery November 20 in Ecology and Evolution.
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Listen closely
The research began with tens of thousands of hours of audio. The sounds had been captured by remote recorders in Tanzania’s Nyerere National Park. They also came from special collars fitted to lions in Zimbabwe.
Growcott’s team ran more than 3,000 calls through a computer program. It was designed to detect patterns in the sound signals. And subtle differences jumped out.
Full-throated roars traced a clear arc. They rose in pitch before ending in a trailing fall. Intermediary roars were flatter and far less elaborate.
The researchers used the length and pitch of a sound to build an algorithm. It’s a type of computer tool built around step-by-step rules for doing something, such as analyzing data. This algorithm classified each type of roar, moan and grunt with high precision. In at least one lion population, its accuracy topped 91 percent.
Roar types and the more informative full-throated call helped the tool identify which lion was roaring. The tool even outperformed human experts.
Tanya Berger-Wolf is a computational ecologist. She works at Ohio State University in Columbus. This is one of the first clear demonstrations that machine learning can reliably interpret the vocalizations of a mammal, she says.
The recordings, however, lack context on what a lion had been doing at the time. So scientists still can’t say why lions choose one roar type over the other.
This is an open question that intrigues lion experts like Craig Packer. He works at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. “It would be interesting to have enough recordings in known contexts to know if lions roar more loudly in certain situations,” he says.
As for the MGM lion, his iconic roar contains no hidden intermediary roar. That’s because the sound doesn’t belong to a lion at all. In a bit of Hollywood movie magic, sound designers opted for something even more ferocious, Growcott says. “The MGM lion is actually a tiger.”
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