Contextual encoding in titi monkey alarm call sequences

Abstract

Many primates produce one type of alarm call to a broad range of events, usually terrestrial predators and non-predatory situations, which raises questions about whether primate alarm calls should be considered “functionally referential”. A recent example is black-fronted titi monkeys, Callicebus nigrifrons, which emit sequences of B-calls to terrestrial predators or when moving towards or near the ground. In this study, we reassess the context-specificity of these utterances, focussing both on their acoustic and sequential structure. We found that B-calls could be differentiated into context-specific acoustic variants (terrestrial predators vs. ground-related movements) and that call sequences to predators had a more regular sequential structure than ground-related sequences. Overall, these findings suggest that the acoustic and temporal structure of titi monkey call sequences discriminate between predator and non-predatory events, fulfilling the production criterion of functional reference.