The form and function of chimpanzee buttress drumming
Abstract
Many animal species use vocal and nonvocal acoustic signals to communicate over large distances. Wild chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes, drum on the buttress roots of trees, generating low-frequency sounds that can reach distances of over 1 km. Buttress drumming is produced in bouts of beats and is often accompanied by pant hoots, the species-typical long-distance vocalization. We investigated whether individual differences exist in the acoustic structure of drumming bouts produced by male chimpanzees of the Waibira community in the Budongo Forest in Uganda, and whether individual, contextual and social factors affected their use of drumming. We found individual differences in drumming bouts produced by seven male chimpanzees during travel events as well as in their timing within the pant hoot, and discriminated specific patterns of beats for some chimpanzees. In contrast, we found no evidence for individual differences in the acoustic structure of drumming bouts produced by four males during displays. Together these findings suggest that chimpanzees may be able to choose to encode identity within individual drumming ‘signatures’. Chimpanzees drummed less frequently as their party size increased. We found no evidence that the age of the signaller or the presence of preferred social partners, higher-ranking males or females in oestrus affected the use of drumming. These findings suggest there may be flexibility in buttress drumming across social and behavioural contexts and provide support for the hypothesis that, by encoding individual identity, long-distance drumming may be used to facilitate chimpanzee fission–fusion social dynamics.
Citation
Eleuteri , V , Henderson , M , Soldati , A , Badihi , G , Zuberbühler , K & Hobaiter , C 2022 , ' The form and function of chimpanzee buttress drumming ' , Animal Behaviour , vol. 192 , pp. 189-205 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.07.013
Publication
Animal Behaviour
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0003-3472Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/).
Description
We thank the Uganda National Council for Science and Technology, the President's Office, the Uganda Wildlife Authority and the National Forestry Authority for permission to conduct research, and the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland for their support of the field site. This research received funding from the European Union's 8th Framework Programme, Horizon 2020, under grant agreement no 802719.Collections
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