Related: There’s One Super Predator in Africa That Instills More Fear Than Lions<\/a><\/p>\n According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, lions are now vulnerable to extinction<\/a>.<\/p>\n My colleagues and I investigated roaring in lions<\/a> to get better at distinguishing between their different vocalisations. But our findings may make it easier to monitor lions’ numbers, which in turn would make it easier to protect them.<\/p>\n You might think you know a lion’s roar from the clip used by MGM at the start of all its films \u2013 but that isn’t quite right. It’s actually a tiger’s roar dubbed on top of this famous piece of cinema<\/a>.<\/p>\n Compared with a lion, a tiger’s roar is often raspier and higher-pitched.<\/p>\n In fact, male and female lions produce what scientists call a “roaring bout”. Each begins with a series of soft moans, followed by a subsection of intermediary and full-throated roars, which finally subside into a repetition of grunts.<\/p>\n There is no set length of time a roaring bout will last (though most are between 30 and 45 seconds), and the number of vocalisations within each subsection does not keep to a strict formula.<\/p>\n The roaring bout is important behaviour. Not only does it signal to other lions in their pride<\/a> where they are, but to unfriendly lions, bouts can be used to advertise territorial boundaries<\/a>.<\/p>\n The loudest, most complex component of a lion’s roaring bout is the full-throated roar, which is an individually identifiable sound<\/a>. Each lion’s full-throated roar is as specific to the individual as the pattern of spots are to a leopard (and as my 2024 paper<\/a> found, their roar too).<\/p>\n Population density estimates are a key metric for identifying priority areas for conservation. If individual lions can be identified by their full-throated roars, then researchers could use this to count them.<\/p>\n However, picking out the full-throated roars from other vocalisations within a roaring bout is tricky. Even for those with expert ears, it is a subjective process which is prone to human bias.<\/p>\n The reason becomes clearer when you look at a spectrogram of a lion’s roaring bout \u2013 a visual representation of its sounds using an x-axis of time (seconds) and y-axis of frequency (hertz).<\/p>\n The full-throated roar at the start of the mid-section of the bout rarely looks or sounds the same as the roar that occurs right before the grunts kick in. Which made me wonder: should these different roars be classified the same?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n My colleagues and I leaned on AI to help us analyse our roar recordings. Perhaps this could help solve the issue of subjectivity, we thought, and classify lion vocalisations automatically, creating a tool so that other researchers always know which roar is right for counting lions.<\/p>\n We used supervised machine learning<\/a> to classify the vocalisations which occur in a lion’s roaring bout into three call types: full-throated roars, grunts, and our newly identified intermediary roar.<\/p>\n From the spectrogram, we could see that the full-throated roar is loud, complex and arcs in pitch. The intermediary roar was a flatter sound with less variation \u2013 and it always followed the full-throated roars. Grunts were shorter and even more compact.<\/p>\n Using simple acoustic parameters \u2013 the duration of each vocalisation and its maximum frequency \u2013 we could then identify each call type with an accuracy of 95.4%. As the full-throated roars are unique to each individual lion, we wanted to test whether our AI analysis of full-throated roars was better at distinguishing between different lions than human hearing.<\/p>\n We found we could identify individual lions at an accuracy of 94.3% \u2013 an improvement of 2.2% over when human-selected full-throated roars were used. Using this technique for identifying full-throated roars could hopefully lead to more accurate population density estimates of lions.<\/p>\n It is exciting to discover the language of lions is more complex than previously thought. However, it is unclear what the communicative differences of the two roar types may be.<\/p>\n Scientists have long believed that lion roars may convey information relating to pride size<\/a>, age and identity \u2013 but without Dr Doolittle to translate the meaning of moans, grunts and roars, this is still guesswork.<\/p>\n Therefore, it may take some time before “lion” appears as an option on Duolingo. For now, we should just celebrate the fact that AI can help us to discover more about wild phenomena as iconic as a lion’s roar. Jonathan Growcott<\/a>, PhD student in Environmental Intelligence, University of Exeter<\/a><\/p>\n This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The roar of an African lion is one of the most iconic sounds of the animal kingdom. 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