Individual Variation of Whinnies Reflects Differences in Membership Between Spider Monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) Communities

Santorelli, Claire J.; Aureli, Filippo; Ramos‐Fernández, Gabriel; Schaffner, Colleen M.

doi:10.1007/s10764-013-9736-2

Cited by 7 publications

(13 citation statements)

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“…Our study showed that whinnies were typically produced as part of vocal exchanges, and that these signals have a substantial and graded acoustic variation related to distance between callers and immediate behaviors. In addition, our results corroborated that whinnies convey potential information about caller identity (Santorelli, Aureli, Ramos‐Fernández, & Schaffner, ; Teixidor & Byrne, ). These results suggest that whinny acoustic variation may play an important role for the maintenance of vocal contact between individuals living in societies with complex spatial dynamics (i.e., fission‐fusion dynamics).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

“…BIC = Schwarz's Bayes’ Information Criterion; AS = Average Silhouette; APMPS = 11 acoustic parameters measured in previous studies conducted in A. geoffroyi (Chapman & Weary, ; Santorelli, Aureli, Ramos‐Fernández, & Schaffner, ; Teixidor & Byrne, ); AAP = All acoustic parameters measured. We indicate the best cluster solution in boldface.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The spider monkey ( Ateles geoffroyi ) is a good model to address this question, since: (i) it has high fission‐fusion dynamics, and therefore, group members are separated by a broad range of distances (Aureli et al, ); and (ii) commonly when a spider monkey produces a contact call denominated “whinny,” receivers produce other whinnies, which suggests that they are answering to the first caller. In addition, whinny acoustic variation can be linked with community membership and caller identity (e.g., Chapman & Weary, ; Santorelli, Aureli, Ramos‐Fernández, & Schaffner, ) and some studies show that they play an important role in achieving group flexibility in space, and maintaining specific social relationship (Chapman & Lefebvre, ; Dubreuil, Notman, & Pavelka, ; Masataka, ). For example, through playback experiments Ramos‐Fernández () showed that individuals that most commonly approach to the speaker are those close‐associates of the individual whose whinnies are broadcasted.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acoustic variation of spider monkeys’ contact calls (whinnies) is related to distance between vocalizing individuals and immediate caller behavior

Ordóñez-Gómez

Santillán-Doherty

Fischer

et al. 2018

American J Primatol

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Due to several factors such as ecological conditions, group size, and social organization, primates frequently spend time out of visual contact with individuals of their own group. Through the use of long-distance vocalizations, often termed "contact calls," primates are able to maintain contact with out-of-sight individuals. Contact calls have been shown to be individually distinct, and reverberation and attenuation provide information about caller distance. It is less clear, however, whether callers actively change the structure of contact calls depending on the distance to the presumed listeners. We studied this question in spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi), a species with complex spatial dynamics (fission-fusion society) that produces highly frequency modulated contact calls, denominated "whinnies." We determined the acoustic characteristics of 566 whinnies recorded from 35 free-ranging spider monkeys that belong to a community located in Mexico, and used cluster analyses, discriminant function analyses, and generalized linear mixed models to assess if they varied in relation to the presumed distance to the listener. Whinnies could be grouped into five subtypes. Since the lowest frequency subtype was mainly produced by spider monkeys that exchanged whinnies at longer distances, and lower frequency calls propagate across longer distances, our results suggest that whinnies vary in order to enhance vocal contact between individuals separated by different distances. Our results also revealed that whinnies convey potential information about caller immediate behaviors and corroborated that these calls are individually distinct. Overall, our results suggest that whinny acoustic variation facilitates the maintenance of vocal contact between individuals living in a society with complex spatial dynamics.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Acoustic variation of spider monkeys’ contact calls (whinnies) is related to distance between vocalizing individuals and immediate caller behavior

Ordóñez-Gómez

Santillán-Doherty

Fischer

et al. 2018

American J Primatol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…individual identity) based on extracted call features (Lee 2010). One of the most commonly used methods for classification of primate vocalizations is linear discriminant function analysis (DFA) (Delgado 2007;Wich et al 2008;Heller et al 2010;Santorelli et al 2013). Linear DFA is a supervised, multivariate technique that tests whether different classes of objects (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Application of a semi-automated vocal fingerprinting approach to monitor Bornean gibbon females in an experimentally fragmented landscape in Sabah, Malaysia

2018

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Vocal individuality has been documented in a variety of mammalian species and it has been proposed that this individuality can be used as a vocal fingerprint to monitor individuals. Here we provide and test a classification method using Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) to extract features from Bornean gibbon female calls. Our method is semi-automated as it requires manual pre-processing to identify and extract calls from the original recordings. We compared two methods of MFCC feature extraction: (1) averaging across all time windows and (2) creating a standardized number of time windows for each call. We analysed 376 calls from 33 gibbon females and, using linear discriminant analysis, found that we were able to improve female identification accuracy from 95.7% with spectrogram features to 98.4% accuracy when averaging MFCCs across time windows, and 98.9% accuracy when using a standardized number of windows. We divided our data randomly into training and test data-sets, and tested the accuracy of support vector machine (SVM) predictions over 100 iterations. We found that we could predict female identity in the test data-set with a 98.8% accuracy. Using SVM on our entire data-set, we were able to predict female identity with 99.5% accuracy (validated by leave-one-out cross-validation). Lastly, we used the method presented here to classify four females recorded during three or more recording seasons using SVM with limited success. We provide evidence that MFCC feature extraction is effective for distinguishing between female Bornean gibbons, and make suggestions for future vocal fingerprinting applications.

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“…0.4 to 3.5 s (Fig 2). In total, we analyzed the acoustic variation of 566 whinnies produced by 35 individuals (S1 Table), and extracted 42 acoustic parameters which were selected based on previous studies and acoustic qualities considered helpful to describe whinny variation [24–26] (S2 Table). To analyze acoustic parameters, we used Avisoft version 5.2.05 (Avisoft SASLab Pro) with a 16 kHz sampling frequency, a fast Fourier transform of 256 samples, and a Hamming window with an overlap of 96.9%.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic variation of spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) contact calls is related to caller isolation and affects listeners’ responses

2019

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Group living animals produce vocalizations denominated “contact calls” to maintain contact with out-of-sight group members. These calls have been shown to vary with caller identity and distance to potential listeners. However, it is not clear whether the acoustic variation of contact calls is related to caller social isolation (e.g., inside or outside a subgroup) and listeners’ responses that can be helpful to maintain contact. Here, we addressed these questions in spider monkeys ( Ateles geoffroyi ), a Neotropical primate that exchanges contact calls denominated “whinnies”, which show graded variation related to caller immediate behavior and distance between callers. Using 566 whinnies produced by 35 free-ranging adult spider monkeys recorded at ≤ 20 m from microphones, we first analyzed whether the acoustic variation of spontaneous whinnies (i.e., whinnies that are not responses to previous whinnies) is related to caller social isolation or whether acoustic variation is related to the likelihood of eliciting a response whinny from another individual. Secondly, we assessed whether listeners’ responses (i.e., time to respond vocally, acoustic characteristics of response whinnies, orienting behaviors) were related to the acoustic variation of previous whinnies. Our study revealed that callers that were outside a subgroup produced whinnies with a lower fundamental frequency (F0), which travels longer distances, and increases the likelihood of producing a response whinny. Moreover, listeners (i.e., responders) responded faster to lower F0 whinnies. However, the acoustic variation (i.e., F0 variation) in response whinnies was better explained by the separation distance between callers, than by the acoustic variation of the previous whinny. Overall, our results suggest that whinny variation facilitates vocal contact to callers that are outside a subgroup, and that context and whinny variation affect listeners’ responses.

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Individual Variation of Whinnies Reflects Differences in Membership Between Spider Monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) Communities

Cited by 7 publications

References 50 publications

Acoustic variation of spider monkeys’ contact calls (whinnies) is related to distance between vocalizing individuals and immediate caller behavior

Acoustic variation of spider monkeys’ contact calls (whinnies) is related to distance between vocalizing individuals and immediate caller behavior

Application of a semi-automated vocal fingerprinting approach to monitor Bornean gibbon females in an experimentally fragmented landscape in Sabah, Malaysia

Acoustic variation of spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) contact calls is related to caller isolation and affects listeners’ responses

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