Even humans love a good mating call
It is important to remember that we humans are simply animals. A very advanced species, but nevertheless a member of the animal kingdom. We all need water, food, and shelter to survive, but we also share another similarity.
Humans also find the calls and mating signals of animals attractive, whether it’s the bright colors of a butterfly’s wings, the sweet scent of a flower, or the melodies of a songbird. The results are detailed in a study published today in the journal Science and indicate that preference for certain animal sounds may be more common than previously thought.
In 1981, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) scientist A. Stanley Rand and research associate Michael J. Ryan discovered that a female tĂșngara frog (Engystomops pustulosus) mate preference depends on the complexity of the male’s call. For this new study, Ryan and his colleagues wanted to know if human preferences for certain animal calls, including the flirtatious calls of male tĂșngara frogs, correlated with the preferences of female animals.
Male TĂșngara Frog calling
“After witnessing these female preferences, Stan and Mike [Ryan] “What’s more, since this team published their first results, we have discovered that other animals, including eavesdroppers such as blood-sucking flies and frog-eating bats, also prefer complex calls.” This led us to wonder how common acoustic preferences might be.
For the study, the team used a computer game to test humans’ preferences for different animal sounds using an online computer game. They presented pairs of animal sounds from 16 different animal species, including crickets, zebra finches (Taeniopygia castanotis), and several species of frogs to more than 4,000 human participants from around the world.
âIn gamified citizen science, people volunteer for experiments simply because they are fun and interesting,â added Samuel Mehr, study co-author and cognitive science researcher at the Child Study Center at Yale University. “The method is perfect for answering questions in evolutionary biology where we aim to study phenomena in many species rather than just a few. Our game allowed us to test many human preferences for many different sounds.”
The sounds came from animals known to display a preference for one sound over another. After listening to these combinations of sounds, humans were asked to express their preference for one or the other sound, much like animals make and listen to sounds.
The team discovered a large overlap between the sound preferences of humans and animals. The stronger an animal’s preference for a specific sound, the more likely it is that a human will choose that sound as their favorite. Human participants were also quicker to select the most appealing sound. Humans and animals share a strong preference for lower-pitched sounds and those with acoustic ornamentation, such as “trills,” “clicks,” and “chucks” in bird songs and frog calls.
“Darwin noticed that animals seem to have a ‘taste for beauty’ that sometimes matches our own preferences,” Ryan concluded. “We show that Darwin’s observation seems true in a general sense, probably because of the many properties of the sensory system that we share with other animals.”
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