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Mandarin diamondback males (Taeniopygia castanotis)
A group of volunteers listened to animal mating calls and played a computer video game — all in the name of science.
It is important to remember that we humans we are simply animals. A species very advancedno doubt, but still members of the animal kingdom. We all need water, food and shelter to survive, but we also share another similarity.
The humans are also attracted by the calls and mating signals of animals, or by vivid colors of a butterfly’s wings, sweet aroma of a flower or the melodies of a songbird.
The findings are described in a published Thursday in Science and indicate that the preference for certain animal sounds may be more common than was thought.
In 1981, the scientist A. Stanley Randof the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI), and associate investigatoro Michael J. Ryan discovered that the preference of the female túngara frog (Engystomops pustulosus) by a mate depends on the complexity of the male’s call.
For the new study, Ryan and his colleagues wanted to understand whether human preferences for certain animal calls, including the seductive calls of male frogs, are related to female preferences of other species.
“After observing these female preferences that Stan and Mike discovered, and when I had the opportunity to measure them myself, I was fascinated by the question of where these preferences come from,” he said. Logan JamesSTRI researcher and lead author of the study, in a statement published on .
“Additionally, since the team published initial findings, we have discovered that other animals, including opportunistic species like blood-sucking flies and frog-eating bats, they also prefer complex calls. This led us to askhow common acoustic preferences might be”.
For the study, the team used a computer game to test human preferences for different animal sounds through an online experiment. The researchers presented pairs of sounds from 16 different species, including crickets, mandarin diamondbacks (Taeniopygia castanotis) and various species of frogs, to more than 4,000 participants from all over the world.
“In citizen science using gamification, people volunteer for experiments simply because they are fun and interesting”explains Samuel Morestudy co-author and cognitive scientist at Yale University’s Child Study Center.
“The method is perfect for answering questions in evolutionary biology, in which we seek to study phenomena in many species, not just a few. Our game allowed us to test many people’s preferences in relation to many different sounds.”
Os sounds came from animals that were already known to have a preference for one sound over another. After listening to these pairs of sounds, human participants were asked to indicate which one did they preferin a similar way to the way in which the animals that emit and hear these sounds do so.
The team found a significant overlap between the sound preferences of humans and animals. The stronger an animal’s preference was for a particular sound, the greater the probability that a human would choose that sound as a favorite.
Humans were also faster at selecting the most appealing sound. Humans and animals share a strong preference for lower sounds and acoustic ornaments, such as “chirps”, “clicks” and “chucks” in bird calls and frog calls.
“Darwin observed that theAnimals seem to have a ‘taste for the beautiful’ which sometimes runs parallel to our own preferences,” Ryan concluded. “The study shows that Darwin’s observation appears to be true in a general sense, likely due to the many features of the sensory system that we share with other animals”.
