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Correlates of social role and conflict severity in wild vervet monkey agonistic screams

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Date
01/05/2019
Author
Mercier, Stéphanie
Déaux, Eloïse C.
van de Waal, Erica
Bono, Axelle E. J.
Zuberbuhler, Klaus
Keywords
BF Psychology
QH301 Biology
DAS
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Abstract
Screams are acoustically distinct, high-pitched and high-amplitude calls, produced by many social species. Despite a wide range of production contexts, screams are characterised by an acoustic structure that appears to serve in altering the behaviour of targeted receivers during agonistic encounters. In chimpanzees, this can be achieved by callers producing acoustic variants that correlate with their identity, social role, relationship with the targeted recipient, the composition of the audience and the nature of the event. Although vervet monkeys (Chlorocebus pygerythrus) have been studied for decades, not much is known about their agonistic screams. Here, we examined agonistic screams produced by wild vervet monkeys to investigate the degree to which caller identity, social role and conflict severity affected call structure. We found that screams were both individually distinctive and dependent of the agonistic events. In particular, victim screams were longer and higher-pitched than aggressor screams, while screams produced in severe conflicts (chases, physical contact) had higher entropy than those in mild conflicts. We discuss these findings in terms of their evolutionary significance and suggest that acoustic variation might serve to reduce the aggression level of opponents, while simultaneously attracting potential helpers.
Citation
Mercier , S , Déaux , E C , van de Waal , E , Bono , A E J & Zuberbuhler , K 2019 , ' Correlates of social role and conflict severity in wild vervet monkey agonistic screams ' , PLoS One , vol. 14 , no. 5 , e0214640 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214640
Publication
PLoS One
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0214640
ISSN
1932-6203
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright: © 2019 Mercier et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Description
This work was funded by the European Research Council under the European Union′s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) / ERC grant agreement n° 283871 (https://ec.europa.eu/research/fp7/index_en.cfm) and the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project 310030_143359; http://www.snf.ch/en/funding). EW was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (P300P3_151187 and 31003A_159587) and the Branco Weiss Fellowship - Society in Science (https://brancoweissfellowship.org/). Data and codes are available on Figshare at https://figshare.com/articles/Correlates_of_social_role_and_conflict_severity_in_wild_vervet_monkey_agonistic_screams/5413975 (DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.5413975).
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/17626

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