They're gonna hear me roar: What do big cats' roars mean?

Audible more than a kilometre away, a leopard’s roar proclaims the caller’s identity and status, alerting potential mating partners and warning off same-sex intruders

Leopard in the Nyerere National Park, Tanzania. Picture: Dr Charlotte Searle 

Birds, whales, and howler-monkeys are Nature’s great vocalists. Cicadas and crickets provide background music in balmy warm climes. Elephants, the double-bass players of the great animal orchestra, send sound vibrations through the ground — too low-pitched for us to hear. The love songs of frogs, like those of Chinese Opera, are an acquired taste. Nor do fish live in what the late Jacques Cousteau once claimed was a ‘silent world’. They too, it seems, can be a noisy lot. Relatively few wild creatures are completely silent or tone deaf.

Big cats produce intimidating roars. Are they just claiming to be the kings of the beasts, or is there more to their vocalisations than meets the ear? Do their utterances carry personal information?