When do hyenas laugh

This is used by clan mates when they want to form an alliance and team up against lions. Mothers use a distinctive groan to tease their cubs out of the den. They groan into the hole and the youngster will quickly peer out. Cubs make a horrible sound similar to grating human nails across a blackboard. This is known as squitting and tells a mother they want to eat. Another clear sound is the alarm call , a resonant and rapid cluster of sounds that alert the clan of impending danger.

Perhaps most impressive of all the sounds is the whoop no, not the Whoopi Goldberg. These calls travel three miles across the savannah and their speed indicates the importance and emotion behind the call.

Quick howls mean notice me and will attract animals from all around. Did they just find something funny? Spotted hyenas are commonly known as the laughing hyenas, but laughter does not mean they are sharing a joke.

These funny noises may express excitement , nervousness when confronted by lions for instance , and are also often produced when the animal is on the prowl for food. Entire clans also produce maniacal laughter when they kill prey.

Studies have shown that laughing sounds are made in a huge variety of circumstances. Spotted hyena start giggling when feeding on a carcass, but also when engaging in physical fights among each other.

Strangely, spotted hyena also laugh when they are being attacked by rivals. When a spotted hyena runs off with part of a carcass it will giggle. Another hyena will give chase and also giggle. This will alert more hyena, who pick up the chase and harass the carcass carrier even more. What sound do you make when excited and also nervous? It is probably a laugh.

But does that mean hyena are actually laughing? No they are not. I also blog about photography with a focus on GoPro and action cameras.

Here is the gear we love to travel with. To capture our adventure and to travel safe and comfortable. See all our favorite stuff here: Recommended Gear. Table of Contents. About the Author Latest Posts. Bryan Haines. Do Squirrels Eat Meat? Attack Methods, Kick Strength. Here's our favorite travel gear: Here is the gear we love to travel with. Only one of these species, however — the spotted hyena Crocuta crocuta — makes the laughing sound that has become synonymous with hyenas, in general.

Researchers have also learned that the pitch of a hyena's "laugh" usually varies dependent upon its social status. Hyena packs are matrilineal, which means that females are dominant and lead the pack.

There's intense competition for food within a pack, and the subordinate animals — often male — tend to "laugh" more frequently with a higher pitch. Are you ready for a good laugh? Be sure to check out the following activities with a friend or family member:. I have found a lot about why hyenas laugh and I think it is really important to no these thing about hyenas. We are undergoing some spring clearing site maintenance and need to temporarily disable the commenting feature.

Thanks for your patience. Drag a word to its definition. You have answered 0 of 3 questions correctly and your score is:. Want to add a little wonder to your website? Help spread the wonder of families learning together. We sent you SMS, for complete subscription please reply. Follow Twitter Instagram Facebook. Why do hyenas laugh? Do all hyenas laugh? In what situations are you most likely to witness hyenas laughing? As we enjoyed a cool drink from the watering hole, we overheard an interesting conversation between a couple of hyenas and a young zebra : Hyena 1: Hey Sal!

Hyena 2: Ha! Good one, Joe! Wonder What's Next? Try It Out Are you ready for a good laugh? Be sure to check out the following activities with a friend or family member: Check out the Why Do Hyenas Laugh?

Write down at least three facts you learn from the video. Share what you learn with a friend or family member! Have you ever heard a hyena laugh? Hyenas actually make a wide variety of vocalizations.

Visit Hyena Sounds online to listen to samples of eight different hyena vocalizations. Both cues resist well to propagation-induced modifications such as filtering or scattering by obstacles. In nest-building species where acoustic exchanges occur mostly at short range, frequency modulation is almost absent and individual identity is encoded by pitch and energy distribution among the spectrum, the latter being highly sensitive to frequency-filtering during long-range propagation [ 65 ].

The present analysis showed that giggles encode individuality mostly by these two last cues, the frequency modulation being not primarily involved. This contrasts with another hyena vocalization, the whoop, where individual signature should be encoded by the pronounced frequency modulation, as visual inspections of spectrograms showed [ 51 ]. Thus and in spite of instabilities in their frequency spectrum [ 71 ], whoops might be more reliable labels of individual identity than giggles over long distances.

Up to now, no systematic study has tried to decipher the behavioural context in which giggles are emitted, nor their role in the society network. Field researchers have observed that these vocalizations are often produced during food contests, by animals that are prevented from securing access to the kill by the intervention of higher ranking individuals. More generally, giggling can occur in non-feeding situations, as the result of simple threat from another individual. Giggles have thus been considered as submissive signals [ 39 , 49 ].

The present study was done in captivity and our behavioural observations were certainly biased. Nevertheless, we observed that hyenas were giggling rather as a result of frustration we kept the bone or the piece of meat out of their reach than of harassment or chase.

Although they are emitted during close-range interactions between two or three individuals, giggles are loud and propagate over great distances [ 39 ] the authors pers. They are thus extremely susceptible to eavesdropping by remote receivers. Giggles may attract other spotted hyenas as well as lions Panthera leo , and even vultures [ 39 ].

During his study in the Ngorongoro Tanzania , Kruuk [ 39 ] noticed that lions often eat prey previously killed by hyenas. Giggles could benefit an individual hyena is different situations. It is known, that a solitary hyena has no chance when confronted to a lion, whereas a hyena group often can "mob" one or two lions, and maintain or gain access to a carcass [ 72 ].

Thus a lone hyena encountering a kill dominated by lions could use its giggle call to rally its clan. The attraction of a neighbouring hyena clan or a lion group can also be an issue, as intense competition and giggling may occur over a kill currently mob by the giggling hyena's clan.

In this situation, one can hypothesize that a dominant hyena might allow a subordinate hyena access to food to prevent it from giggling and attracting further attention from unwanted competitors. Or potentially giggling by multiple subordinate animals giggle chorus could serve as a distraction for the more dominant animals. However, these hypothetical situations could also potentially incur cost for the emitters who risk being completely deprived of food if the competing clan or lion group takes over.

Cooperation and competition are everyday components of a spotted hyena's life. On a larger scale, giggles from a hyena group could attract conspecifics, allowing more successful "mobbing" of lions. It is also interesting to note that the loud giggle call is absent from the vocal repertoire of the sympatric but less social Brown hyena, Hyaena brunnea [ 49 ]. Field observations and playback experiments are needed to determine the attraction potential of giggles towards allies versus intra- and inter-specific competitors, and to assess the cost-to-benefit balance of this vocalization.

The possibility of monitoring the size and the composition of a feeding group from a distance should also be investigated to assess if a clan could get information about its neighbours by simply eavesdropping on their giggles.

This information could also be of interest to researchers with conservation purposes. Primarily emitted during common confrontations, such as those occurring over food, giggles may play an important role in spreading of individual-related information among clan-mates. The social organization of a hyena clan involves a matrilineal hierarchy. The majority of adult males are immigrants and they are "queuing" for social status, i. Since males depart from their natal clan and attempt to join a new clan when mature, the age information embedded in the giggle could be highly informative.

The giggle was also produced in a conflict with a human which we attribute to have a neutral social rank. Although the bi-modal grouping and our experimental protocol allowed us to clearly divide animals into subordinate and dominant, it is a situation which is far from the hierarchical rank that could be found in wild clans of 10 to 90 individuals.

It is possible that animals in the "middle" of the rank produce different giggle bouts when these are directed to higher ranking versus lower ranking animals. This hypothesis would also imply acoustical structure that is dependent not on morphological characteristics but on the recognition of social context and the possibility of vocal plasticity. This hypothesis could be tested both in the field and in our captive colony by housing animals in larger groups.

The vocal repertoire of spotted hyenas is very large and most of the calls should play a role in the regulation of the social network. Status signalling is almost certainly not restricted to giggles. The whoop is used to transfer information to remote congeners and may allow individual identification of the sender as well as its current emotional state over distances up to 5 km [ 51 , 53 , 73 , 74 ]. Not only are whoop calls highly idiosyncratic making but it is also known that mothers will respond to the whoop from their own cub more frequently than to the whoop of a non-kin cub, demonstrating that the individual characteristics in the whoop sounds are recognized and utilized [ 73 ].

It is likely that close-range vocalizations like the grunt, groan and growl, are also multi-informative [[ 39 ], Page et al. The use of both 'public' and 'private' signalling [ 75 , 76 ], would enable hyenas to manage their social interactions with great precision. In this context, giggles might play a dual role, addressed to both nearby clan-mates and remote potential allies. Spotted hyenas demonstrate high cognitive skills, like their ability to recognize third-party relationships [ 77 ], a characteristic that has been found in a restricted number of animals e.

Their substantial vocal repertoire should play a very important role, by providing eavesdroppers with a number of important cues about the emitters' identity and characteristics. As the present study showed, the giggle is likely to carry a broad range of messages, certainly not all perfectly reliable, but sufficiently informative to play a role during social interactions. Information carried by vocalizations, together with chemical, tactile and visual channels [ 48 , 80 ], ensure to the spotted hyena an array of communication signals which underlie its complex social system.

More research, with a particular emphasis on experimental studies with playback - or involving manipulations -, is needed to specifically determine whether the information bearing structure in giggle sounds described here is actually used by the spotted hyena and, more generally, to decipher the complex communication network of this species.

Comparing the spotted hyena's communication system with the one of other, less social, Hyaenids [ 81 ] would also be of great interest and facilitate understanding of the relationships between sociality and animal signals. Google Scholar. Clutton-Brock T: Breeding together: kin selection and mutualism in cooperative vertebrates.

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