From the eerie croak of a tropical frog to the haunting call of the howler monkey, the animal kingdom is filled with some wild and wacky mating calls.
But which do you find the most appealing?
Scientists have come up with an online quiz that asks you to listen to two calls from males of the same species and pick which you think is the most attractive or interesting.
While it might sound like a bizarre question, researchers have found that humans and animals have remarkably similar tastes.
The team, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, wanted to know whether the features that make certain animal calls irresistible to females of the species would also be music to our human ears.
Each question of the quiz compares two calls from species where scientists have found a strong preference for a certain type of song.
By choosing which call you think is better, you can discover what kind of animal you share the most musical sensibilities with.
So, are you a fan of crickets’ rhythmic chirping, or do you prefer the tuneful whistle of forest birds? Take the quiz to find out.
To test if our acoustic preferences are consistent with animals, Dr Logan James and his co–authors created the ‘Calls of the Wild’ online quiz.
More than 4,000 participants from around the world assessed 16 pairs of calls from different species, voting for which they thought sounded better.
Surprisingly, the results revealed that people tended to agree with animals a lot of the time.
Humans seem to pick up on and enjoy the same features of mating calls as a wide range of animals, including birds, amphibians, primates, and even insects.
The researchers found that the stronger a species’ preference for a certain type of call, the more likely it was that a human would pick that call as their favourite.
Humans were also faster to pick a sound as their favourite when the species had a stronger preference for one call over another.
But not only do we have the same subjective preferences as animals, but humans also show overlapping preferences for certain qualities of an animal’s call.
Dr James told the Daily Mail: We found strong preferences in both animals and humans for acoustic “adornments”. These are extra sounds that can be added on, such as clicks, chucks, and trills, which everyone seems to like.’
By choosing which call you think is better, you can discover what kind of animal you share the most musical sensibilities with
Scientists found that humans agree with animals like the túngara frogs, as we both prefer mating calls that have more complexity
This suggests that the features that animals consider ‘beautiful’ are sometimes paralleled by our own preferences.
This could be because we have similar sensory systems, or because there are some features which are more universally appealing.
The researchers were inspired to create the tool by, scientists Stanley Rand and Michael J. Ryan, who in the early 1980s pinpointed the exact feature of a frog’s call that made it attractive.
They discovered that female túngara frogs, small pond–dwelling amphibians found in Mexico and northern South America, chose mates based on the complexity of their call.
The male frogs produce a long whine followed by a series of short ‘chucks’, and the more chucks they produce, the more interested the females become.
However, female túngara frogs aren’t the only ones listening in on the males’ recitals.
Predators like the frog–eating fringe–lipped bat eavesdrop on these courting rituals and, just like the females, tend to go after males with more complex chucks.
‘Darwin noted that animals seem to have a “taste for the beautiful” that sometimes parallels our own preferences,’ Mr Ryan said.
‘We show that Darwin’s observation seems to be true in a general sense, probably due to the many sensory system properties we share with other animals.’
