Call diversity of wild male orangutans: a phylogenetic approach

Abstract

Over the past 20 years several studies have attempted to clarify orangutan systematics based on DNA sequences and karyological and morphological data; however, the systematic and phylogenetic relationships among orangutan taxa remain controversial. Surprisingly, few systematic studies have used data from wild-living orangutans of exactly known provenance. Furthermore, most of these studies pooled data from huge geographic areas in their analyses, thus ignoring possibly distinct subpopulations. This study represents a new approach to orangutan systematics that uses orangutan long calls. Long calls are species-specific vocalizations used by many nonhuman primates, and data on their acoustical and temporal structures have been used to assess the relationships among, and phylogenies of, several primate taxa. Altogether, 78 long calls from wild-living orangutans from five populations in Borneo and five in Sumatra were included in the analyses. Aside from the chiefly paraphyletic topology of cladistic results, which neither support nor reject a Borneo-Sumatra dichotomy, bootstrap values support three monophyletic clades (northwest Borneo, northeast-east Borneo, and Ketambe) that corroborate geographic groups. The shortest trees and multivariate analyses provide some support for a closer relationship between Sumatran and specific Bornean demes than between particular Bornean demes themselves, indicating that conservation management should be based on orangutans from different populations rather than on just the two island-specific groups.

Acoustic structure of male loud-calls support molecular phylogeny of Sumatran and Javanese leaf monkeys (genus Presbytis)

“…Comparable studies in other nonhuman primates are lacking. However, single studies on loud-calls of orangutans [16], Thomas langurs [17], chimpanzees [18], black-and-white colobus monkeys [19] or sportive lemurs [20] revealed geographic or genetic related differences in the structure of loud-calls of these species. Some previous studies proposed that loud-calls of surilis could be a useful tool to characterize phylogenetic relatedness [21-23].…”

Unidirectional Microphone based Wireless Recorder for the Respiration Sound

“…The most popular microphones which the research groups employed in lung sound studies were Sony TM ECM-77B omnidirectional electret condenser microphone [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] and Sony TM ECM-T140 [8][9][10][11][12][13], and T150 electret condenser microphones with air coupler [14][15][16][17][18]. Observing the time sequence of the cited studies [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18], the findings were that the applications of linguistics and voice recognition at first, and then the studies related to the lung sounds were continuously employed the Sony TM ECM-77B, T140, and T150 omnidirectional microphones. Was the adoption of microphones such as Sony TM ECM-77B, T140, and T150 evaluated by the paper survey or the considerations of the lung sound characteristics?…”

Vocal communication in a complex multi-level society: constrained acoustic structure and flexible call usage in Guinea baboons

“…Several studies conducted among closely related species revealed a high inter-specific concordance in numerous acoustic features [51,52] and phylogenetic analyses have shown that the degree of inter-specific vocal variability is bound by genetic relatedness [53-57]. In contrast to the acoustic structure, the usage of vocal signals is considered to be more flexible and partly under voluntary control [14,58].…”