Why Do Hyenas Laugh? It Is the Sound of Losing

Every wildlife film about the African plains eventually cuts to the same shot: a knot of hyenas shoving each other around a carcass in the dark, with that rising giggle running over the top of the shoving. It plays like a crowd enjoying itself. Almost nobody watching stops to ask which hyena in the pile is making the noise.

It is the one losing.

Why do hyenas laugh?

Spotted hyenas giggle mostly during food fights, and the call signals frustration and submission rather than amusement. Nicolas Mathevon and colleagues found the laugh is produced by animals kept away from a kill by higher-ranking clanmates, and the acoustic structure of the call broadcasts the caller’s age, individual identity and rank.

Those measurements come from 17 spotted hyenas at the University of California, Berkeley’s field station, where the team recorded 254 giggle bouts containing 1,807 notes for a 2010 paper in BMC Ecology. The paper is blunt about what earlier field observation had already established: giggles come from animals “prevented from securing access to the kill by the intervention of higher ranking individuals”. The recordings explained what else was leaking out.

Pitch tracks the age, wobble tracks the rank

A giggle is assembled from very short notes, averaging 69 milliseconds each and pitched around 547 Hz. Two properties of that structure vary between animals, and neither is under the caller’s control.

The first is pitch, set by how often the sound wave repeats, which is also what Auto-Tune measures in a singer’s voice before moving it onto the nearest note. Mean fundamental frequency falls from about 650 Hz at two years old to under 450 Hz by twenty, a decline of roughly 30 percent. A giggle is therefore an approximate birth certificate, read aloud at the worst possible moment.

The second is steadiness. Variability in note frequency was higher in subordinate animals than in dominant ones, so the more frantic and uneven a giggle sounds, the lower the status of the hyena producing it. Sex, by contrast, left no reliable acoustic trace. Roosters carry rank in a different part of the call: the main sign of a rooster’s status appears to be how often he crows, and in a lab study the top-ranked bird crowed first on almost every morning.

Familiar animal noise usually turns out to be doing a job rather than expressing a mood, which is also the case with the racket that comes out of long grass on summer nights.

The call in your head is probably the other one

The sound most people picture when they think of hyenas is not the giggle. It is the whoop, the long rising call that carries across open country, and the two work nothing alike.

Neither one is the whole vocabulary. Mathevon’s paper describes the spotted hyena’s repertoire as large, with more than ten different vocalizations, and these two sit at opposite ends of it, one pitched at an animal a body-length away and the other at a clanmate several kilometres off.

	The giggle	The whoop
Structure	Staccato notes of about 69 ms	Long rising calls, 2 to 34 per bout
Situation	Food contests, being displaced from a kill	Long-distance contact
Reach	The scrum around the carcass	Audible up to 5 km
Gives away	Age, rank, individual identity	Individual identity, but no clan accent

That last cell is the sharpest result in the literature. Kenna Lehmann and co-authors analysed 514 whoops from 39 hyenas across four clans for a 2022 paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. On the 13 animals recorded often enough to test, a classifier picked out the individual caller 54 percent of the time against 9 percent expected by chance. Asked which clan the caller belonged to across the full set, the same approach managed 32 percent against a chance level of 24 percent, which is no better than guessing. Hyenas have voices. They do not have accents.

The Lion King version is close to backwards

The pop-culture hyena cackles because it is amused, mocking something weaker than itself. That version is folklore, assembled backwards from a noise that happens to land near human laughter, and the recordings point the other way. Giggling is what the animal on the losing end of a food fight does, and the Animal Diversity Web account of the spotted hyena notes the call is associated with fear or excitement and is often given when an individual is being chased.

Mathevon’s team floated one consequence that inverts the scene entirely.

“A dominant hyena might allow a subordinate hyena access to food to prevent it from giggling and attracting further attention from unwanted competitors.”

On that reading, the giggle is closer to a car alarm than a joke. It is noisy, it is involuntary, it advertises trouble to everyone in earshot, and the cheapest way to switch it off is to let the complainer eat. A reputation can outrun the evidence for a very long time, which is roughly what happened to the most famous wall ever built.

Only one of the four hyenas laughs

Hyaenidae contains four living species, each in its own genus: the spotted hyena, the striped hyena, the brown hyena and the aardwolf. The laughing reputation belongs to the spotted hyena alone. The striped hyena’s vocal communication is “not highly developed”, running mainly to soft growls, and the aardwolf calls only when startled, fighting or stressed, between meals of up to 300,000 termites a night.

The dog resemblance is a coincidence too. The NCBI taxonomy database places Hyaenidae in the suborder Feliformia, the cat side of the order Carnivora, alongside civets and mongooses, while Canidae sits in Caniformia. The cackling dog of the popular image gets the animal and the sound wrong in the same breath. Animals with bad public reputations tend to look different on inspection, as the insect the world would most like to abolish also demonstrates.

Back at the carcass, the soundtrack stops sounding cheerful once the grammar is obvious. Every giggle in that scrum is announcing to the entire clan roughly how old the caller is, which individual it is, and that it is currently being outranked at dinner. The most famous laugh in the animal kingdom is a complaint with a name tag attached. Strictly FYI.