Listen to a Lion’s Second Type of Roar, Which Was Just Discovered by Scientists

Researchers uncovered the previously unknown vocalization while creating an algorithm that can identify and monitor lions based on audio recordings

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

November 25, 2025

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African lions have thunderous roars. The explosive sound rattles your eardrums when it booms in a nature documentary. But it turns out that the powerful roar we attribute to the big cats isn’t the only one they’re capable of.

By sifting through thousands of recorded lion sounds, scientists discovered a previously unknown “intermediary roar,” which is shorter and lower-pitched than a full-throated roar. The finding, published in the journal Ecology and Evolution on November 20, helped the team construct an artificial intelligence-based program that could improve efforts to monitor the big cats.

“If you can identify a lion by its roar, this could potentially be a tool to count the number of individuals within a landscape,” Jonathan Growcott, a study co-author and conservation technologist at the University of Exeter in England, tells Elie Dolgin at Science News.

Scientists discover a new type of lion roar

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Fewer than 25,000 lions are estimated to live in Africa, and the species (Panthera leo) is considered vulnerable to extinction. The animals use their resounding roars to mark territory and to communicate with their pride, and past research has shown that the sounds are unique to individual animals, reports Sascha Pare at Live Science. Each lion’s full-throated roar holds clues about the cat’s sex, age and other features.

Roars can even help researchers estimate lion population sizes and keep tabs on specific animals, Growcott says in a statement. But “until now, identifying these roars relied heavily on expert judgment, introducing potential human bias.”

So, Growcott and his colleagues attempted to create an A.I.-based algorithm to automatically classify different types of lion vocalizations, such as full-throated roars, moans and grunts, Growcott writes in the Conversation. The team collected more than 3,000 individual lion sounds by setting up microphones in Tanzania’s Nyerere National Park and attaching acoustic collars to lions in Zimbabwe’s Bubye Valley Conservancy.

Using pattern-recognition A.I. algorithms to analyze the sounds, which were graphed by frequency over time, the newfound roar stood out. The visual representations showed classic, full-throated roars as obvious arcs, with their pitches rising and falling. But the newly discovered intermediary roars, which followed the bigger roars, appeared flattened and had fewer changes in pitch.

Based on the sound data, the team built the vocalization-identifying algorithm, which identified each lion call type with more than 95 percent accuracy. The program was also better than people at identifying individual lions.

Growcott tells Live Science that he hopes the new work “will lead to more accurate acoustic population density estimates, which can better inform the pressing needs of conservation.”

Those sound-based estimates are part of a technique called bioacoustic monitoring, in which researchers study wildlife through sounds captured via recorders. It could provide a new way to monitor lions, whose population is estimated to have shrunk by more than 40 percent between 1993 and 2014, largely due to habitat loss, poaching and human-wildlife conflict.

Tanya Berger-Wolf, a computational ecologist at Ohio State University who was not involved in the research, calls the study “a good example of bioacoustic monitoring beyond birds, amphibians and insects,” per Science News. It’s one of the first clear examples of A.I. interpreting a mammal’s vocalizations, she adds.

Still, researchers are stumped by what lions might be saying through their intermediary roars.

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

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.