A study discovered that each leopard has its own roar, which can therefore be identified thanks to its “voice”: let’s listen.
If we imagine listening to a roar in the African savannah, the powerful and characteristic of the lion probably comes to mind. But other felids also live in those areas: the leopards, which are noticed with a very particular roar, reminiscent of the sound produced by sawing a trunk. It is a vocalization made by males and females, used to attract partners and mark the territory. You can listen to the roar of the leopard above.
Listen to the voice of the leopard
Jonathan Growcott of the University of Exeter (UK) and colleagues conducted a study in the Nyerere National Park in Tanzania, to whom we dedicate an article on number 390 of Evidence Network (below, the cover). They found that each leopard has his own unique and personal roar. It was found that other representatives of the Panthera genre, such as the tiger and the lion, also have individual roars and now this has also emerged in the leopard (Panthera pardus).
This Felide, skilled in climbing the trees (males weigh up to over 70 kg, the females over 40), spread with various subspecies in Africa and Asia, can be identified by the rosettes on the cloak, unique for each animal. The researchers associated with the images of individuals, taken with phototrappole, the roars recorded at their passage. So they saw that audio can be a method of identification and therefore monitoring these animals. As Growcott explains, “for animals that produce sounds, acoustic monitoring (more and more proposed by scientists, editor’s note) allows us to understand where a species lives and even how many individuals are in a population. One of its advantages is that it can be used to cover an extended area, more efficiently in terms of costs and time ».
