Crocs may be better than humans at recognising a baby's cries of distress

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2023-08-09 09:01

International

Image by Monika from Pixabay

It's not just the smile, you should also never cry at a crocodile, according to international researchers, who say crocs may be better tuned than humans when it comes to recognising the cries of babies in distress. The team used sound recordings to determine that Nile crocodiles are attracted to cries from infant bonobos, chimpanzees, and terrifyingly, humans too. They say that crocodiles use specific aspects of the sounds to determine what level of distress their potential prey is in, and they believe that the crocodiles may be more attuned to our babies' distress than we are.

Media release

From: The Royal Society

Crocodile perception of distress in Hominid baby cries

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Summary: Like humans, many animals express their emotions through their voice. But can an animal perceive the emotions conveyed by the voice of another animal species? Using playback experiments, here we show that Nile crocodiles are attracted by the cries of human and ape babies. Surprisingly, given their distant evolutionary relatedness with hominids, these reptiles assess the degree of distress conveyed by the cries using acoustic markers that are more reliable than those used by humans. Being skilled at gauging the distress of a potential prey is the least these top predators can do!

Journal/
conference: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: University of Saint-Etienne, France

Funder: This research has been funded by the Institut universitaire de France (NM), the Labex CeLyA (Lyon Center of Acoustics ANR-10- LABX-60, PhD funding to J.T. and L.P.), the CNRS and the University of Saint-Etienne.

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