Why Roosters Don’t Go Deaf from Their Own Loud Crowing

Why rooster’s don’t go deaf from their own loud crowing? We mean that, it’s almost as noisy as shouts or the roar of motorcycle. But they look still okay with that and did not get any specific pain by their own crowing.

A rooster is commonly refer to a male chicken that often crowing out loud. A rooster is portryaed to crow at the break of dawn with the sound cock-a-doodle-doo. But in fact most rooster can be crowing frequently in the entire day. It can be at dawn, noon, or sometimes at night. The rooster’s breed and personality will affect their frequent crowing and so did their crowing loudness.

If you by any chance going or have a poultry farm, you will be familiar of the loud noise from the roosters crowing. And for your information roosters or chicken in general have a strong hierarchy. It means that a leader of roosters will always crow first and will be followed by other roosters. But eventhough roosters are often to fight each other to proclaims their territory.

Did you ever seen a rooster crowing? They sometime crowing in the height such as fench, pole, or any other object. This behaviour is a way for them to proclaim their territory. A roosters crow or even a hens will crow too as a signal of warning. The warning from potential harm even though hens are not as louder as the roosters are.

Comparing Human with Roosters Tolerance to Sound

Here we will discuss about why roosters’s don’t go deaf from their own loud crowing? There were a research by attaching metered microphones to rooster’s head. It has been found that the rooster’s crowing are around or even exceed 100 decibels. If human are exposed by the same sound power frequently it will caused a serious damage such as deaf or other hearing pain.

Since for human, our ears are delicate and can not tolerate a sound louder than 120 decibels, for human a loud noice equal to that like a chainsaw machine can cause a permanent hearing loss. The air pressure waves from the noise can give an exposure that huge enough to harm or even kill the hair cells inside our ears. The hair cells convert sound waves into the noises that our brain can process. And for human a sound that equal to 130 decibels will only take a half secong to cause a bit of hearing damage.

But as you can see for roosters itself while they can crow at least for 100 decibels or even more as mentioned before, least we expected them to experienced a hearing damage or even deafness. Instead, they still can crow frequently every day but still in a full of joy. Well actually the roosters have these secret to prevent them from their own loud crowing :

Own Natural Mechanism

1. Anatomy Adaption

They have put a tinny microphones to the head of roosters. It is used to measure the rooster’s sound levels that they heard while they are crowing. The crow were also measured from a distance away and another measurement tools was used. As we already knew that the decibels levels were all over 100 decibels and there is one rooster that even hit a 140 decibels it almost equal to an aricraftt carrier deck sounds. Absolutely for human it will permanently cause several hearing damage and even deafness.

• The researchers found out that the roosters keep themselves safe from hearing damage by their own crow with an anatomy adaptation. Unlike human, roosters and other birds or other similiar animals have their own natural mechanism in their ear to prevent them for being in pain or being deaf from high pitch sound.
• In a paper published in the journal of Zoology they discovered that half of their eardrum was covered by a soft tissues. This layer of tissues dampened incoming noise and it covers almost 50 percent of the eardrum area.

2. Natural Ear Protector

Another thing that found by the researcher in when the roosters start to crowing they tilted their head back and another part of their ear or material is covering the ear canal completely, in human it equal with ear protection or bult-in ear plug, but indeed it give more protection than the ear plug was.

3. Rooster Can Regrown Hair Cells

In the inner ear both human and animals such as birds or roosters or chicken we could find a tiny little hair. This tiny hair called as hair cells. This is a part of ear act as sensory receptors of both the auditory and vestibular system. The hair cells will detect movement in their environment and processes it as a sound. Once a hair cells damaged it will not regenerate for human or other mamals.

• Birds as researchers said has an ability to regrow their damaged hair cells. It is totally different from human which can not cure their damaged hair cells. But birds can regenerate it. The researcher also tend to make a same point on the rooster’s. Rooster’s may have an ability to regrow their hair cells. Human don’t have a same ability to roosters or birds. The human’s deafness is often caused by loud sound and the effect is permanent for us. And for roosters there is a degree of deafness would likely be temporary if it happened at all.

• From a Micro-CT scans of chicken heads it show that their auditory canal closes when they open their beak. But the different from hens and chick from roosters is that their auditory canal only narrows and it does not close completely. So in hen it does not fully covered up their ear but still it’s like a sound filter and soundproof to prevent them from roosters crowing. It almost like someone put and ear plug or finger inside your ear while roosters are crowing.

Conclusion

And if you take a close attention a rooster will find a vantage point if they want to crow (away from their chicks and hens). The roosters crow out loud and ever louder is to tell other roosters to stay away from their hens, and when they get louder and louder the shape of their ears will slowly changed too.

This ability to protect themselves as we see it from the evolutionary perspective is make sense. The roosters crowing is also represent their fitnes. We can conclude that the more louder the roosters the more fit they are and the loudest one will end up being seen as the most fit to mate with a hen.

And those are an explanantion of why roosters don’t go deaf from their own loud crowing. Hope this article will give you a view about that matter. If you interested in build a poultry farm you also must understand how take care a chicks, breed them, and raise baby chicks properly.