The application of acoustic indices is incipient and still needs validation before it can reliably characterize soundscapes and monitor rapidly disappearing hot-spot areas as the Brazilian tropical savanna (Cerrado). Here we investigate which of six acoustic indices better correlate with the 24 h zoophony richness of insects, anurans, birds, and mammals. We sampled one minute every 30 minutes for seven days on three sites in Serra da Canastra National Park (Minas Gerais state, Brazil) and extracted the sonotype richness and six indices based on recordings with a bandwidth of up to 48 kHz. The Acoustic Diversity, Evenness, Entropy, and Normalized Difference Soundscape indices followed the temporal trends of the sonotype richness of insects and anurans. The Acoustic Complexity (ACI) and Bioacoustic (BIO) indices did not correlated with sonotype richness. ACI and BIO were influenced by sonic abundance and geophony. We emphasize the need to include insects and anurans on soundscape and acoustic ecology analyses and to avoid bias on avian fauna alone. We also suggest that future studies explore measures of sonic abundance and acoustic niche occupation of sonotypes to complement measures of zoophony richness and better understand what each faunal group is telling us about indices.

Although bioacoustics is increasingly used to study species and environments for their monitoring and conservation, detecting calls produced by species of interest is prohibitively time consuming when done manually. Here we compared four methods for detecting and identifying roar-barks of maned wolves (Chrysocyon brachyurus) within long sound recordings: (1) a manual method, (2) an automated detector method using Raven Pro 1.4, (3) an automated detector method using XBAT and (4) a mixed method using XBAT's detector followed by manual verification. Recordings were done using a song meter installed at the Serra da Canastra National Park (Minas Gerais, Brazil). For each method we evaluated the following variables in a 24-h recording: (1) total time required analysing files, (2) number of false positives identified and (3) number of true positives identified compared to total number of target sounds. Automated methods required less time to analyse the recordings (77 -93 min) when compared to manual method (189 min), but consistently presented more false positives and were less efficient in identifying true positives (manual ¼ 91.89%, Raven ¼ 32.43% and XBAT ¼ 84.86%). Adding a manual verification after XBAT detection dramatically increased efficiency in identifying target sounds (XBAT þ manual ¼ 100% true positives). Manual verification of XBAT detections seems to be the best way out of the proposed methods to collect target sound data for studies where large amounts of audio data need to be analysed in a reasonable time (111 min, 58.73% of the time required to find calls manually).

Treatment of major depression, posttraumatic stress disorder and other psychopathologies with antidepressants can be associated with improvement of the cognitive deficits related to these disorders. Although the mechanisms of these effects are not completely elucidated, alterations in the extinction of aversive memories are believed to play a role in these psychopathologies. We have recently verified that female rats present low levels of extinction when submitted to the plus-maze discriminative avoidance task. In the present study, female rats were treated long term with clinically used antidepressants (fluoxetine, nortriptyline or mirtazapine) and subjected to the plus-maze discriminative avoidance task to evaluate learning, memory, extinction and anxiety-related behaviors as well as behavioral despair in the forced swimming test. All groups learned the task and exhibited retrieval. Chronic treatment with fluoxetine (but not with the other antidepressants tested) increased extinction of the discriminative task. In the forced swimming test, the animals treated with fluoxetine and mirtazapine showed decreased immobility duration. In conclusion, fluoxetine potentiated extinction, while both fluoxetine and mirtazapine were effective in ameliorating depressive-like behavior in the forced swimming test, suggesting a possible dissociation between the effects on mood and the extinction of aversive memories in female rats.

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