Advertising individual identity by mother and adolescent contact calls in Siberian wapiti Cervus elaphus sibiricus

Abstract

Individualistic contact calls facilitate mother‐offspring reunion after separation. However, in many mammals, both the acoustic structure and individuality of contact calls differ between mother and young. In contrast, in Siberian wapiti Cervus elaphus sibiricus, contact calls are similar in the acoustics between mother and young, whereas effects of this similarity on vocal individuality were not investigated. In this study, we analyzed acoustic differences between closed‐mouth (nasal) and open‐mouth (oral) contact calls and examined individuality of the most usual oral calls of 19 Siberian wapiti (9 hinds and 10 5–6‐month adolescents) emitted in response to mother‐offspring separation. In the oral calls, the values of frequency and power variables were higher than in the nasal calls. Calls of hinds and adolescents did not differ by the maximum fundamental frequency and duration, whereas the peak frequency was higher in the young. Discriminant function analysis (DFA) based on 11 acoustic variables of oral calls accurately classified to individual 92.5% of hind calls and 96.9% of adolescent calls (chi‐square test for differences between hinds and adolescents, p = 0.19). Variables mainly contributing to vocal identity (duration, start, and maximum fundamental frequency) were the same in calls of mothers and adolescents. We conclude that similarities in the acoustics calls of mothers and adolescents mean that they do not differ in their potential for encoding individual identity, suggesting a mutual process of mother‐offspring vocal recognition in Siberian wapiti.

Old and young female voices: effects of body weight, condition and social discomfort on the vocal aging in red deer hinds (Cervus elaphus)

“…The energy shifts towards higher frequencies (and respective increase of power quartile values) represent a common rule of acoustic changes associated with increased emotional arousal of mammalian callers (Volodin et al, 2009;Gogoleva et al, 2010a, b;Briefer, 2012) and callers across other taxa of vertebrates (Lingle et al, 2012;Filippi et al, 2017). Consistently, elevated emotional arousal results in increase of fundamental frequency in cervid species: red deer (Volodin et al, 2015;Golosova et al, 2017;Sibiryakova et al, 2018) and fallow deer (Charlton & Reby, 2011). We conclude therefore that the effect of emotional arousal on call fundamental frequency (f0 increase) was the opposite to the effects of aging (f0 decrease).…”

“…A greater number of variables related to the fundamental frequency decreased in the nasal calls, whereas only the maximum fundamental frequency decreased in the oral calls. Probably, the effects of aging were better expressed in the nasal than in the oral contact calls because of the effect of the higher emotional arousal of the hinds during emission of the oral calls (Sibiryakova et al, 2015(Sibiryakova et al, , 2018. The energy shifts towards higher frequencies (and respective increase of power quartile values) represent a common rule of acoustic changes associated with increased emotional arousal of mammalian callers (Volodin et al, 2009;Gogoleva et al, 2010a, b;Briefer, 2012) and callers across other taxa of vertebrates (Lingle et al, 2012;Filippi et al, 2017).…”

Giant panda mothers can discriminate own neonates from others based on their squalls

“…如种群密度、幼仔的扩散能力 (Sébe et al, 2008;Martin et al, 2022)。 研究表明, 群居哺乳动物具有母 幼识别的机制 (Volodin et al, 2017;Sibiryakova et al, 2018;Nuñez & Rubenstein, 2020;Martin et al, 2022), 因其具有较高的种群密度 (Masataka, 1985;Torriani et al, 2006;Blank & Yang, 2017;Charrier et al, 2017), 并且部分物种的幼仔具有较强的扩散能力 (Sébe et al, 2008;Martin et al, 2022) 野外, 大熊猫母兽产后立即进入2-3周的禁食期 (Lü et al, 1994;Zhu et al, 2001), 并将主要精力用于照顾 幼仔 (Zhu et al, 2001) 和个体间变异系数(CV b ), 计算公式如下:…”