September 27, 2010
Why Some Kitties Meow and Others Roar
Hannibal, a male clouded leopard at Smithsonian's National Zoo's Conservation & Research Center (photo courtesy of the National Zoo)
Members of the cat family (Felidae) are nearly all lone creatures and use meows and roars to communicate to potential mates over long distances. (Lions are the exceptions; they’re the only social kitty species.) Scientists have wondered why some calls are high pitched—like your housecat’s meow—or deeper, like a cheetah’s. Size would be the obvious answer, and research until now has shown that larger cats tend to have lower pitched calls. But a new study in the Biological Journal of the Linnean Society says that it’s habitat that matters more.
Gustav Peters and Marcell Peters, of the Zoological Research Museum in Bonn, Germany, examined the relationship between call frequency, a cat’s habitat and its place in the evolution of cats. The researchers found that cats that lived in open habitats like the African plains tended to communicate with deep-sounding calls. Kitties that lived in forested habitats, such as clouded leopards, produced high-pitched calls.
Their finding was unexpected because “most studies of sound transmission of animal acoustic signals found that lower frequencies prevail in dense habitats,” Peters told the BBC. High-frequency sounds can more easily become disrupted by the vegetation found in forests while low-frequency sounds travel less well in open spaces where they can be disrupted by air turbulence. Why cat calls seem to have evolved in such a contrary way will have to be the subject of further study.
(And if you’ve ever wondered why only lions, tigers, jaguars and leopards can roar, here’s why: Only those four species have an elastic ligament connecting bones that support the larynx in the throat. That ligament is necessary to produce a roar.)
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[...] Sarah the cat lover (really, she loves cats; see what I mean?) is busy with another project, she turned the blog [...]
My newest cat does not meow like a regular cat. I barely knew she was ‘calling’ the first few times until I saw her do it. She is small for 18 months and her meow is like a tiny growl. I’ve only heard it around meal times whe she is anticipating her food. I was told she was sbadly treated by a foster ‘parent’ she was staying with and wonder if that’s the reason. She is quite skittish when first approached but loves to be petted.
I am do not believe that your statement that “Lions are the only social kitty species,” is correct. According to many recent articles, (Curtis, Knowles, Crowle-Davis, “Social organization in the cat: A modern understanding”: Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery, February 2004 vol. 6 no. 1 19-28 being just one of many studies) Felis Catus or the domestic cat is actually a social animal. Many published studies show that while the house cat CAN live alone, it does not prefer live alone.
In my own experience, cats left to their own devices do not tend to establish independent territories for solitary existence. Even when there is space to spread out, domestic cats tend to cluster in loose groups, females often helping rear each other’s kittens in commumal nests, while males come and go visiting the group in a recurring pattern.
There was a documentary, perhaps from the 1990s with very good footage of a group of barn cats on a large dairy farm in England. But in any case, the idea that domestic cats are solitary creatures is old science.