Many animals, like humans, use sounds to communicate. Moreover, if a person uses words for this, animals can transmit information by changing the tonality and volume of the sounds they make. The louder the sound, the more tribesmen can hear the transmitted message.
Sea creatures
The sounds made by marine mammals, such as whales or sperm whales, can be heard due to the fact that they are propagated by low-frequency impulses in a dense medium - water, for hundreds of kilometers. True and the initial volume of these sounds is quite high. So, a blue whale makes sounds with a power of up to 188 dB, and an adult sperm whale - up to 116 dB, while the cubs of a sperm whale call their mother with cries of an intensity of up to 162 dB.
Scientists have learned to recognize by the volume of the sounds that these giants emit, not only their size, but also which clan the animal belongs to. By these sounds, you can also determine what it is doing at the moment - hunting, feeding, grooming, raising cubs, or simply communicating with each other.
Land animals
Of the animals living on land, the crocodile is considered the loudest. During the mating season, males can make sounds with a volume of 108-110 dB. However, a hippopotamus also left not far from it - the volume of sounds emitted by these animals can reach 106 dB.
The roar of a donkey in loudness is 78 dB, in the category of pets it is considered the champion.
Howler monkeys live in the jungles of Central and South America. As their name suggests, they are masters of yelling too. In males, a bone bubble is located under the tongue, in which the sounds emitted under certain conditions begin to resonate, amplifying many times over. The cry of males, of course, is not very euphonic - it resembles both the roar of a donkey and the barking of a dog, but you can hear it from many kilometers away.
Of the birds, the Indian peacock has the loudest voice. His sharp guttural screams can be heard from several kilometers away.
The loudest insects
Despite their modest size, some insects can compete with animals in terms of the loudness of their sounds. Thus, an ordinary water beetle of the subspecies Micronecta scholtzi can chirp with a volume of up to 105 dB, although its size and weight are millions of times less than that of the same sperm whale or crocodile.
Male cicadas can also make sounds of particular loudness, which use the vibration of ribbed plates in two resonator cavities on the abdomen to generate them. Females can hear these sounds from a distance of several kilometers, and the human ear can distinguish them from several hundred meters.
An insect like the bear, which lives deeply buried in the ground and feeds on the roots of plants, on occasion also does not miss the opportunity to crawl to the surface and make a sound, the volume of which can reach 92 dB, although the chirping of a bear can be heard very rarely.
