Loudest Animals on Earth

About This Dataset

The loudest animals by peak recorded sound level, in decibels. The sperm whale's echolocation clicks reach around 230 dB underwater - the loudest sound produced by any animal - while on land the kakapo and cicada are among the noisiest.

✨ AI Insight

The sperm whale (230 dB) is the loudest animal on Earth, its echolocation clicks powerful enough, in theory, to be lethal at close range - followed by the tiny pistol shrimp (≈200 dB), which snaps its claw so fast it creates a cavitation bubble that briefly reaches star-like temperatures. The blue whale (188 dB) rounds out the marine trio at the top. A large gap then drops to the land animals: the flightless kakapo parrot (132 dB), the cicada (120 dB) and the howler monkey (90 dB), the loudest primate. Note that underwater and airborne decibels are measured on different reference scales and are not directly comparable, but on any measure the marine mammals' sounds are astonishingly powerful - a consequence of water carrying sound far more efficiently than air.

Source: IFAW / HowStuffWorks

Key Findings

Auto-computed highlights from this dataset

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Sperm whale leads with 230 in All Time.

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Average value in All Time: 160 · median: 160.

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Gap in All Time: Sperm whale is 2.6× larger than Howler monkey.