Loudest Animals on Earth
Key Findings
About This Dataset
Loudest Animals on EarthThe 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.
Data Insights
Numbers, trends & sources behind this chart
Methodology & source
- Data source
- IFAW / HowStuffWorks
- Coverage
- 6 entities · 6 observations
- Measure
- Recorded Sound Level (decibels)
- Last updated
- 12 July 2026
- Compiled by
- The ANYSTAT team, from the source above
- Values are shown as reported by the source. Nothing is rescaled, rebased or converted — the only changes are thousand separators and decimals shown to two places.
- Entities are ranked highest-first on their value.
Data Sources & References
All external sources cited in this dataset
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