Humans and Animals Often Like the Same Mating Calls, Supporting a 150-Year-Old Observation by Charles Darwin

New research by Smithsonian scientists suggests that preferences for certain sounds might be evolutionarily conserved

Sarah Kuta | Daily Correspondent

March 23, 2026

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Plants and animals have evolved all sorts of ways to make themselves more appealing to potential mates—including colorful feet, flamboyant feathers, complex mating dances and sexual deception. Many species also rely on sound, uttering specialized vocalizations to signal their reproductive readiness.

It turns out that some of the most mesmerizing animal mating calls also appeal to humans—even if that wasn’t what the creatures intended, according to a study published March 19 in the journal Science. Although researchers don’t know why human preferences seem to mirror those of the animals themselves, the findings suggest we might be more tuned into the noises of other species than previously thought.

“These are signals that were designed to be attractive but never designed to attract humans, specifically,” says lead author Logan James, an animal communication researcher at McGill University in Canada, the University of Texas at Austin and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, to Scientific American’s Jackie Flynn Mogensen. “It’s cool to think that maybe because we share some of our basic sensory processing with those other animals, we get to enjoy in that beauty as well.”

Past research has shown that animals tend to prefer some mating calls more than others. The female túngara frog, for instance, seems to enjoy more complex courtship sounds from males and appears to use song intricacy to select potential mates. Other species often share this preference. Eavesdropping creatures like blood-sucking flies and frog-eating fringe-lipped bats are drawn to complex male frog calls too.

James and his colleagues wondered whether humans might also share acoustic preferences with animals. So, they set up an experiment involving more than 4,000 human listeners around the world via an online survey. Participants tuned their ears to 110 pairs of mating calls from 16 different species of amphibians, mammals, birds and insects, and picked which sound from each pair they liked more. The scientists already knew which one the animals preferred.

The results were “striking,” James writes for the Conversation. When the researchers compared the participants’ selections to animals’ preferences, they found strong alignment between the two. Across the different species, humans were more likely than chance to select the same mating call that the animals themselves had chosen.

The stronger an animal’s preference for a sound, the more likely humans were to choose it. Participants also responded more quickly when they heard the sound that animals liked more.

Both animals and humans appear to favor courtship calls with acoustic adornments—extra flourishes like trills, clicks and chucks—as well as lower-frequency sounds.

The results held true when researchers accounted for factors like musical expertise and animal sound knowledge. Musicians and bird-watchers, for instance, showed similar degrees of agreement as nonexpert participants.

The only significant predictor of agreement was time spent listening to music, with participants who reported spending more time listening to music per day tending to agree more with the animals—a surprising finding that James considers worthy of further investigation.

Why would humans share animal preferences for mating calls? The researchers suspect it might have something to do with physiological likenesses, since humans and many other species rely on similar setups to detect and process sound.

Future studies might explore whether humans also share other sensory preferences with animals, such as visual cues or smells. Another open question is whether humans and animals exhibit similar brain activity when perceiving the same preferential stimulus. The human participants disagreed with animals in some instances—for example, when listening to the mating calls of the gelada monkey—and the researchers also hope to probe these discrepancies moving forward.

“It calls for so much more investigation to understand what is really going on in the minds of the animals and in the minds of the people that are doing these ratings,” David Reby, a bioacoustics researcher at Jean Monnet University in France, who wasn’t involved in the study, tells Scientific American.

In the meantime, the results support and even expand upon English naturalist Charles Darwin’s 1871 observation that animals “have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have.”

“Whereas Darwin’s original idea of shared preferences alluded to the visual coloration of birds, our findings suggest a more expansive shared ‘taste for the beautiful,’” the researchers write in the paper.

Sarah Kuta | Read More

Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.