Scientists have discovered a new type of lion roar: the mesoroar. This is shorter and lower pitched than the animal’s iconic full-throated roar.
The researchers found that these intermediate roars always followed the full-throat roar. The discovery reveals that lion roars are more complex than previously thought, said study lead author Jonathan Growcott, a doctoral student in mathematics and statistics at the University of Exeter in the UK.
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The discovery, published Friday (Nov. 21) in the journal Ecology and Evolution, challenges the long-held idea that only one type of lion roars, and could help researchers better estimate lion populations, he said.
Lions roar to signal their pride and establish territory. Previous research has shown that a lion’s full-throated roar is a unique, individually identifiable sign that contains information about the animal’s gender, age, and other characteristics. This suggests that audio recordings could help scientists count the number of lions in the landscape and thereby estimate population density, Grocott said.
For the study, researchers deployed 50 custom-built microphones in Tanzania’s Nyerere National Park and attached acoustic sensors to the collars of five lions in Zimbabwe’s Bubai Valley Reserve. The research team recorded a total of 3,149 African lion (lion) calls.
The research team then used artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze the sound and uncovered the intermediate roar.
Without AI, Growcott says, understanding full-throat roars and identifying lions based on their sounds has always been subjective. Lions also make other sounds, such as growls, growls, chomps, growls, and meows, but we know that only full-throated roars have distinguishable characteristics, so it’s important to correctly identify these roars and extract as much information as possible from them.
The researchers’ AI model was able to classify the types of lion sounds with more than 95% accuracy, significantly removing the bias that occurs when researchers try to characterize lion sounds manually. This approach also made it easier to identify individual lions based on their full-throat roars, highlighting previously unknown intermediate roars. That knowledge could help researchers isolate full-throat roars in the future.
“This new method of proving that intermediate roars exist and are distinct from full-throat roars is an important first step toward ensuring consistency in selecting full-throat roars,” Growcott said.
According to the IUCN Red List, there are only about 23,000 African lions left in the wild, making the species critically endangered. Traditional methods of estimating lion populations include camera traps and spore surveys, but these require large amounts of resources and can be less accurate than acoustic surveys.
“We hope that by using data-based predicted full-throat roars, we can obtain more accurate acoustic population density estimates and better signal immediate conservation needs,” Grocott said.
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