Everyone wants to live the boombox scene from Say Anything, where a young John Cusack serenades his love to the strains of Peter Gabriel. When the film came out in 1989, a million hearts gained their latest teen god. But you know what&rsquos louder, and statistically more effective in the wild The mating call of the white bellbird (Procnias albus), a bright neotropical species from the Amazon that shrieks for potential mates at a startling 125 decibels. For reference, the human pain threshold is 85 decibels.
We&rsquore not saying you climb up a tree and start screaming at your darling&rsquos bedroom window. Nonetheless, one can&rsquot help but admire this little bird&rsquos skill in making its presence felt. Researchers were surprised at the thickness of the bird&rsquos well-defined abdominal wall (abs, it&rsquos always abs), which they suspected was behind this incredible set of pipes. The find was published in journal Cell Biology last month, and it stipulates that the male bellbird&rsquos mating call is twice as loud the screaming piha, another tropical bird which has held the record since 2004.
Jeff Podos, a biologist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst co-authored the study with Mario Cohn-Haft, curator of birds at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia in Manaus. They found that the male bellbirds had a specific courtship ritual to pivot on branches and blast their mating call directly at a female&rsquos face. The close range could cause hearing damage, which is probably why the yellowish-green ladies&mdashwho don&rsquot sing at all&mdashfly off to a reasonable distance before the males begin. The calls are of two types a gutting scream, and a shorter (and louder) two-tone call.
According to the IUCN, the white bellbird is a &lsquoleast concern&rsquo animal endemic to the forests of Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Bolivia and Venezuela. This is the first study into its mating call. With a decibel level louder than howler monkeys and even chainsaws, we reckon it&rsquoll be a while since it finds a worthy competitor.