What is the loudest animal in the world?

Question

What is the loudest animal in the world?

Answer 1

blue whale.

Answer 2

The blue whale can produce sounds up to 188 decibels. This is the loudest sound produced by a living animal and has been detected as far away as 530 miles.

Answer 3

howler monkeys are quite loud too!

Answer 4

With all due respect to the national zoo, the correct answer to this question is the giant sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) and not the blue whale (Balenoptera muscalus), but the 188 decibel figure is correct.

In the deep ocean, there are thermal inversion layers, like the ones that trap smog in the atmosphere.  These oceanic thermal inversion layers act as almost perfect mirrors for very low frequency sound (16 to 20 cycles per second), so the whales vocalizations easily carry completely around the world.

Just how loud is 188 decibels?  It is so loud you can't even make that much noise in air.  Air can't physically carry that much sound.  Water can carry much more sound than air, and sound travels 4-1/3 times faster through water than through air.  I88 decibels is so loud that if you were half a mile away from such a sound source in the deep ocean, the sound alone would pull every hair from your body.  It's so loud we don't understand how any living creature could make such a sound and survive.  In air, 130 decibels is the pain threshold, and 140 decibels can kill.

While the loudest whale vocalizations we know of come from giant sperm whales, blue whales are only a decibel or two behind them, and all of the rorquals (lunge feeders, like the blue whale) are right up there, with the possible exception of the minke whales (B. acutorostrata and B. bonaerensis).  Still, these are only the loudest sounds we've recorded so far at depths of over 3,000 feet, and there aren't all that many people listening for whale sounds at such depths.

Because all of the sounds that emanate from whales, except intestinal noises, contain a seemingly random pattern of peaked and chopped-off sound waves, it is reasonable to assume that they are using binary code to communicate, and they have probably had global communication as a working reality for millions of years, if not tens of millions of years.

Answer 5

lyrebirds are the loudest birds, but howler monkeys might be somewhat louder.

The indri (a big lemur) and gibbons are also very loud.  They sound louder than a howler monkey to me because their voices aren't as raspy or harsh, but the howler has more decibels behind the noise.

Answer 6

My wife

Answer 7

Blue Whale

Look at this site it's cool

http://nationalzoo.si.edu/Animals/Animal...