Are human babies the loudest in animal kingdom?

[Danijel Gorupec]

Yes, a dumb question, but I am just listening to a baby crying across the village and I cannot remember if I ever heard any baby animal crying that loud... Strange.

Are baby gorillas equally loud when crying?

As far as I can remember, baby chicken can get very loud - possibly only quieter than human babies due to smaller body size. Are ostrich babies particularly loud?

[mistermack]

A calf is louder than a baby. You can hear them miles away.

Lambs are pretty loud too.

[zapatos]

Baby deer are also surprisingly loud.

[Moontanman]

1 hour ago, Danijel Gorupec said:

Yes, a dumb question, but I am just listening to a baby crying across the village and I cannot remember if I ever heard any baby animal crying that loud... Strange.

Are baby gorillas equally loud when crying?

As far as I can remember, baby chicken can get very loud - possibly only quieter than human babies due to smaller body size. Are ostrich babies particularly loud?

is it possible that human babies appear to be so loud because we humans are biologically tuned to hear them when they are crying? i know a crying baby seems to go directly to my motor cortex and causes me to at least jump in a way that suggests my need to go to the baby! 

also nursing mothers will immediately start to produce copious amounts of milk when a baby cries nearby. 

Edited June 22, 2022 by Moontanman

[zapatos]

2 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

is it possible that human babies appear to be so loud because we humans are biologically tuned to hear them when they are crying?

Quote

Ever wondered why it is so difficult to ignore the sound of a crying baby when you are trapped aboard a train or aeroplane? Scientists have found that our brains are hard-wired to respond strongly to the sound, making us more attentive and priming our bodies to help whenever we hear it – even if we're not the baby's parents.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/17/crying-babies-hard-ignore

[Peterkin]

1 hour ago, Danijel Gorupec said:

Are baby gorillas equally loud when crying?

They can be loud when distressed, but it's not like a human baby's crying. One reason is, the mother gorilla, like other apes and monkeys*, normally carries her baby, taking care of its needs before the baby has anything to cry about. (*They pretty much have to: What do you think would happen if a baby gorilla were left alone?) And that's also one reason human babies cry loudly : to summon their mother when they can't feel her presence.

Of course, they also cry if they're afraid, hungry or in pain, since crying is the only vocalization available to them. Baby elephants and donkeys can make very loud noises, but it's not crying. I have never heard an ostrich hatchling, but I imagine it makes a sound like other birds, a vague cheeping that has not yet acquired their species' characteristic vocabulary of sounds. Adult ostriches can be very loud indeed. 

[Moontanman]

5 minutes ago, zapatos said:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/oct/17/crying-babies-hard-ignore

point for that! Exactly what I feel when a baby cries!

[Phi for All]

25 minutes ago, Moontanman said:

point for that! Exactly what I feel when a baby cries!

Apparently, it's a mammal thing, and it works across species: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crying-baby-mammals-all-sound-the-same-to-mama/

Quote

 

A sharp cry pierces the air. Soon a worried mother deer approaches the source of the sound, expecting to find her fawn. But the sound is coming from a speaker system, and the call isn't that of a baby deer at all. It's an infant fur seal's.

Because deer and seals do not live in the same habitats, mother deer should not know how baby seal screams sound, reasoned biologists Susan Lingle of the University of Winnipeg and Tobias Riede of Midwestern University, who were running the acoustic experiment. So why did a mother deer react with concern?

 

 

[Peterkin]

Seals and fawns sound pretty similar to me, as well: a high-pitched cry. Would a deer come to a baby raccoon? They chirp, more like birds. And, just to complicate matters, some birds sound like humans or seals.  

[Danijel Gorupec]

1 hour ago, mistermack said:

A calf is louder than a baby. You can hear them miles away.

Lambs are pretty loud too.

 

1 hour ago, zapatos said:

Baby deer are also surprisingly loud.

Interesting... at first I would instead expect that calf, lamb and deer babies keep quiet, not to attract predators. Isn't it true that in some animals, mothers can leave their babes in quiet hiding for some limited time?

Human babies obviously do not even think about predators, lol.

[MigL]

"Are human babies the loudest in animal kingdom?"

No, it only seems that way when you're trying to get them to stop.
( my nephew has a newborn baby girl, Sadie )

[zapatos]

1 hour ago, Danijel Gorupec said:

 

Interesting... at first I would instead expect that calf, lamb and deer babies keep quiet, not to attract predators. Isn't it true that in some animals, mothers can leave their babes in quiet hiding for some limited time?

Human babies obviously do not even think about predators, lol.

I have seen a lot of fawns up close over the years and never heard one make a sound. One day I let my dogs out at night to pee and they found a fawn. Fortunately they didn't do anything other than try to play with it, but the fawn was freaking out and ran into a corner on my deck. I picked up the fawn and was carrying it near some cover in my yard when it started letting out this loud kind of scream. About 20 seconds later the mother jumped over my fence about 10 feet from me and scared the crap out of me. I of course immediately set it down and it ran off with its mother. That is the only time I've heard one.

[mistermack]

It might be that herd animals babies are more likely to be loud, as they have a bit of group security, but could get lost in the crowd, and need a way to contact the parent. We humans are historically used to living in large bands, and calves and lambs are herd animals. 

[Peterkin]

We don't often hear some animals, because our habitation doesn't overlap enough. Some, we don't know how loud they can be, because they're quiet when we're near them, usually out of fear. Domestic animals, we tend to be familiar both with their indoor and outdoor voices. And we don't hear some animals, because, like fawns and quail, they're trained to hiding. Their loud noises are the infrequent ones, when an animal is in distress - it's an emergency; nothing to lose by broadcasting their whereabouts. 

For human babies, it's always and emergency.

[mistermack]

14 hours ago, Peterkin said:

For human babies, it's always and emergency.

We humans are evolved from animals like chimps that lived in very large family groups. It's instinctive in the great apes to protect the infants, even though they are not direct relatives. Since nearly everyone in the social group shares fairly close family ties, it helps your own dna flourish, if you look after the infants of others. So human babies being loud means they are unlikely to get mislaid for long. Someone will pick it up and take it back to the group.

[Peterkin]

8 minutes ago, mistermack said:

Someone will pick it up and take it back to the group.

Or eat it. We were no more alone in the world than gorillas during our pre-civilized development. Predators have better hearing than humans; the leopard will be alerted to a baby's cries sooner and from farther away than the villagers. People in that situation didn't go around mislaying their babies - unless deliberately, because they were surplus or defective - the mother had it tied to her body even while foraging and cooking. In some societies, they still do.  I suspect those babies are much quieter than their modern counterparts, for the same reason other animals' young are: for concealment. Infants are adaptable; they conform to their circumstances.

Anecdote: A long time ago, there was a young deaf couple among our acquaintance. They had a baby which turned out to have normal hearing. That baby learned, very early on, not to vocalize its distress signals. It went through all the motions and gestures of crying, red in the face, wide open mouth, clenched fists - but very little sound. Their service dog could hear it from anywhere in the house. She doted on that baby. (Perhaps not so oddly, I can't recall the baby's sex or what it looked like - but I really liked that chunky yellow Lab.)  

[mistermack]

1 hour ago, Peterkin said:

the leopard will be alerted to a baby's cries sooner and from farther away than the villagers.

The studies that I've seen conclude that leopards avoid chimpanzee territories. The reason they gave was that the troop of chimps have a hundred alert pairs of eyes, and give the alarm as soon as a leopard gets anywhere near, and one alarm sets them all off. So leopards not only fail to snatch a chimp, but all the local game are alerted, so they very rarely catch anything in chimpanzee territory. The local leopards learn that pretty quickly and avoid the chimp territory. 

You get similar pictures with monkeys and deer in India. The deer use the monkeys as lookouts, and the deer can smell upwind predators, so they all benefit. 

[Peterkin]

10 minutes ago, mistermack said:

The local leopards learn that pretty quickly and avoid the chimp territory. 

So would the local humans, who didn't spend all their time clustered together, because their dietary requirements and poor climbing skills, forced them to hunt and forage a large surface territory and spread out more. But maybe the leopards also stayed away from humans, because they made the connection between chimpanzees and other great apes.... Maybe the hyenas and pythons, jackals and wolverines were less intelligent. Plus, you can't even trust chimpanzees to resist the temptation of easy protein - they don't know we're related.

For whatever reason, indigenous the mothers rarely put their babies down, and then not out of sight.

Edited June 23, 2022 by Peterkin

[mistermack]

7 minutes ago, Peterkin said:

For whatever reason, indigenous the mothers rarely put their babies down, and then not out of sight.

It's a very complicated picture, human evolution. Because we went through such big changes in a short time. I usually picture our ape ancestors lives, when trying to explain a modern trait, but that's not perfect.

Modern indigenous mothers would be very wise not to put the babies down, because there are nearly always dogs and even pigs running loose, so I don't find that surprising. But that situation doesn't go back very far in history. 

Our ancestors became upright about six or seven million years ago, which you would think would make them vulnerable to leopards, as they would run slower and climb badly. They must have had a very effective defence against predators though, bearing in mind that we reproduce slowly. I think it was a combination of social organisation, and the use of weapons, in particular the hand-held spear. So the had effectively armed males guarding the foraging parties. That's just specualtion on my part, but they must have had something effective. 

[Peterkin]

All of that. Plus fire. All the same, I imagine they did lose some children to the odd leopard and various other predators - that's just life in the wild. We lose some to cars, guns, swimming pools and human predation - that's just life in modern civilization.

2 hours ago, mistermack said:

I usually picture our ape ancestors lives, when trying to explain a modern trait, but that's not perfect.

There is certainly a similarity in the relationship of mothers and infants. Lemurs, monkeys and apes all carry their nursing young, either on their back or slung across the front, where it can get at the nipple. A quite sensible arrangement, as it keeps the infant safe, not only from predators but also older siblings and incidental damage, while reassuring the mother and baby, building trust and a sense of emotional security in the child. This matters greatly to a social animal whose success in life will always depend on its ability to form emotional connections with other members of its species. This is why children who are neglected in infancy have such difficulty learning or socializing as they grow.     

 

Edited June 23, 2022 by Peterkin

[dimreepr]

It strikes me that this is a question of recognition rather than volume; for instance, in a penguin colony even the loudest baby (and they do have to be loud) won't be heard from the other side of the colony unless it's cry is unique and distinguishable. A human baby only has to make enough noise to be heard in a relatively quiet environment with only a few competitors, recognition would come when the parent see's it, rather than a unique cry.

[mistermack]

Another big difference between us humans and our recent ancestors is of course the lack of hair on the body.

That takes away the typical carrying mode for baby apes, where they cling on to the mother's fur. And of course, our babies stay babies for far longer than those of chimps and gorillas. Which means that humans have a heavy baby that is helpless, whereas chimps have a lightweight baby that has an extremely strong grip, and can easily hang on while the mother goes about her business, and becomes independent much earlier. 

Indigenous women usually have some carrying sling or other, that wouldn't have been available to our more distant ancestors, so they must have struggled a bit, carrying a heavy child all day. Older children probably put in a shift carrying the baby, while the mother foraged. 

[Peterkin]

2 hours ago, mistermack said:

hat takes away the typical carrying mode for baby apes, where they cling on to the mother's fur. And of course, our babies stay babies for far longer than those of chimps and gorillas. Which means that humans have a heavy baby that is helpless, whereas chimps have a lightweight baby that has an extremely strong grip, and can easily hang on while the mother goes about her business, and becomes independent much earlier

That's why humans learned early on to cover themselves with the skins of other animals that do have fur and make slings and wrappings for the babies they carry.

2 hours ago, mistermack said:

Indigenous women usually have some carrying sling or other, that wouldn't have been available to our more distant ancestors, so they must have struggled a bit, carrying a heavy child all day. Older children probably put in a shift carrying the baby, while the mother foraged. 

They still do. Also fathers and uncles, when the baby gets bigger. Beyond that, there are other strategies adopted by many animals that can't carry their young: shared nursery duty where the young are pooled and presided by several members of the group while others are busy foraging or building or other chores. There is somethng to be said for the cohesive community vs nuclear family.   

[Moontanman]

I found this to be interesting! 

 

[Peterkin]

It does sound similar to the fawn and the baby seal mentioned earlier. I guess mothers can't take any chances.