Lions have two types of roar

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SteffenTravel/Shutterstock Lions have two types of roar – new research Published: November 25, 2025 5.42pm GMT Jonathan Growcott, University of Exeter

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Jonathan Growcott
PhD student in Environmental Intelligence, University of Exeter

Disclosure statement

Jonathan Growcott was funded via a doctoral training grant awarded as part of the UKRI AI Centre for Doctoral Training in Environmental Intelligence (UKRI grant number EP/S022074/1).

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University of Exeter provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.64628/AB.eq7s9fcf3

https://theconversation.com/lions-have-two-types-of-roar-new-research-270314 https://theconversation.com/lions-have-two-types-of-roar-new-research-270314 Link copied Share article

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The roar of an African lion is one of the most iconic sounds of the animal kingdom. However, my new research suggests it should actually be separated into two distinct vocalisations: the full-throated roar, and an “intermediary roar” with a flatter, less varied sound. Making this distinction could have important implications for lions’ conservation.

The total population of wild lions in Africa is estimated to be between 22,000 and 25,000, but this number is half what it was 25 years ago. The main drivers of this decline are habitat loss and fragmentation, reduction in prey, and conflict with local people. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature red list, lions are now vulnerable to extinction.

My colleagues and I investigated roaring in lions to get better at distinguishing between their different vocalisations. But our findings may make it easier to monitor lions’ numbers, which in turn would make it easier to protect them.

You might think you know a lion’s roar from the clip used by MGM at the start of all its films – but that isn’t quite right. It’s actually a tiger’s roar dubbed on top of this famous piece of cinema. Compared with a lion, a tiger’s roar is often raspier and higher-pitched.

In fact, male and female lions produce what scientists call a “roaring bout”. Each begins with a series of soft moans, followed by a subsection of intermediary and full-throated roars, which finally subside into a repetition of grunts.

There is no set length of time a roaring bout will last (though most are between 30 and 45 seconds) and the number of vocalisations within each subsection does not keep to a strict formula.

The roaring bout is important behaviour. Not only does it signal to other lions in their pride where they are, but to unfriendly lions, bouts can be used to advertise territorial boundaries.

The loudest, most complex component of a lion’s roaring bout is the full-throated roar, which is an individually identifiable sound. Each lion’s full-throated roar is as specific to the individual as the pattern of spots are to a leopard (and as my 2024 paper found, as their roar is too).

Population density estimates are a key metric for identifying priority areas for conservation. If individual lions can be identified by their full-throated roars, then researchers could use this to count them.

However, picking out the full-throated roars from other vocalisations within a roaring bout is tricky. Even for those with expert ears, it is a subjective process which is prone to human bias.

The reason becomes clearer when you look at a spectrogram of a lion’s roaring bout – a visual representation of its sounds using an x-axis of time (seconds) and y-axis of frequency (hertz). The full-throated roar at the start of the mid-section of the bout rarely looks or sounds the same as the roar that occurs right before the grunts kick in. Which made me wonder: should these different roars be classified the same?

My colleagues and I leaned on AI to help us analyse our roar recordings. Perhaps this could help solve the issue of subjectivity, we thought, and classify lion vocalisations automatically, creating a tool so that other researchers always know which roar is right for counting lions.

We used supervised machine learning to classify the vocalisations which occur in a lion’s roaring bout into three call types: full-throated roars, grunts, and our newly identified intermediary roar.

From the spectrogram, we could see that the full-throated roar is loud, complex and arcs in pitch. The intermediary roar was a flatter sound with less variation – and it always followed the full-throated roars. Grunts were shorter and even more compact.

Using simple acoustic parameters – the duration of each vocalisation and its maximum frequency – we could then identify each call type with an accuracy of 95.4%. As the full-throated roars are unique to each individual lion, we wanted to test whether our AI analysis of full-throated roars was better at distinguishing between different lions than human hearing.

We found we could identify individual lions at an accuracy of 94.3% – an improvement of 2.2% over when human-selected full-throated roars were used. Using this technique for identifying full-throated roars could hopefully lead to more accurate population density estimates of lions.

Read more: Lions are still being farmed in South Africa for hunters and tourism – they shouldn't be

It is exciting to discover the language of lions is more complex than previously thought. However, it is unclear what the communicative differences of the two roar types may be.

Scientists have long believed that lion roars may convey information relating to pride size, age and identity – but without Dr Doolittle to translate the meaning of moans, grunts and roars, this is still guesswork.

Therefore, it may take some time before “lion” appears as an option on Duolingo. For now, we should just celebrate the fact that AI can help us to discover more about wild phenomena as iconic as a lion’s roar.