Crocodile perception of distress in hominid baby cries
Julie Th\'evenet, L\'eo Papet, G\'erard Coureaud, Nicolas Boyer,, Florence Levr\'ero, Nicolas Grimault (CRNL), Nicolas Mathevon

TL;DR
This study demonstrates that Nile crocodiles can detect distress in hominid infant cries and respond based on specific acoustic features, revealing cross-species sensitivity to distress signals and differences in decoding criteria between crocodiles and humans.
Contribution
It is the first to show crocodiles' ability to perceive distress in distant vertebrate species' vocalizations and identifies key acoustic features influencing their responses.
Findings
Crocodiles are attracted to infant hominid cries.
Response intensity depends on specific acoustic features.
Crocodiles and humans use different criteria to interpret distress.
Abstract
It is generally argued that distress vocalizations, a common modality for alerting conspecifics across a wide range of terrestrial vertebrates, share acoustic features that allow heterospecific communication. Yet studies suggest that the acoustic traits used to decode distress may vary between species, leading to decoding errors. Here we found through playback experiments that Nile crocodiles are attracted to infant hominid cries (bonobo, chimpanzee and human), and that the intensity of crocodile response depends critically on a set of specific acoustic features (mainly deterministic chaos, harmonicity and spectral prominences). Our results suggest that crocodiles are sensitive to the degree of distress encoded in the vocalizations of phylogenetically very distant vertebrates. A comparison of these results with those obtained with human subjects confronted with the same stimuli further…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
