Elsevier

Animal Behaviour

Volume 71, Issue 5, May 2006, Pages 1141-1154
Animal Behaviour

Contact call diversity in wild orange-fronted parakeet pairs, Aratinga canicularis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.anbehav.2005.09.011Get rights and content

Contact calls are used to maintain cohesion and coordinate movements in social animals. The amount and type of identity information provided by contact calls are linked to social organization. Socially stable species often converge on shared group-specific contact calls. In socially fluid species, contact calls tend to be individually distinctive; evidence indicates that such calls are important for mediating individual-specific interactions. Dolphins, for example, will mimic the individually distinctive contact calls of other individuals while socializing. We examined contact calls in another fission–fusion species, the orange-fronted parakeet. Free-living and temporarily captive nonbreeding pairs as well as free-living breeding pairs were recorded. In all contexts, pairs produced multiple (up to nine) discrete contact call types, but like dolphins, typically favoured one to two individually specific variants per bird. The number of dominant variants produced and their evenness of use varied with context. Captive pairs produced the fewest dominants, using them with high evenness. Free-living nonbreeding pairs produced more dominants, and showed similarly high evenness. Breeding pairs varied widely in the number of dominants produced and their evenness of use, showing both the highest and lowest values of each. Latent acoustic measures revealed greater structural variation within and among dominants for free-living compared to captive pairs, presumably reflecting the increased opportunity for social interaction available in the wild. Across contexts, calls could be accurately assigned to pair using acoustic measures; however, within-pair call clustering was not greater than that between pairs. Pairs' calls were distinctive, but in a way that preserved individual variation.

Section snippets

Study Area, Selected Contexts and Bird Recording

The study was conducted in the dry forest zone of the Area de Conservacion Guanacaste (ACG), Costa Rica. We observed all policies regarding animal welfare established by the ACG, the University of California San Diego and Cornell University. The breeding season for orange-fronted parakeets in Guanacaste runs from mid-December to mid-May, with a peak in activity from February to March. This coincides with the dry season of the Central American Pacific coast. June to November marks the wet

Diversity Based on Visual Classification

Table 1 summarizes the number of calls analysed, total number of variants detected, and relative use of dominant variants for each focal pair in each context. Figure 1 shows the overall diversity, richness, equivalent richness and evenness of each pair's dominant repertoire. Pairs produced three to nine total contact call variants, and the number of dominant variants (richness) ranged from two to five. There was a just-significant relationship between sample size and total number of variants

Contact Call Use and Diversity

One goal of this study was to determine whether wild orange-fronted parakeets produce individually distinctive signature calls. Focal pairs produced a total of three to nine visually distinctive contact call types, two to five of which were dominant for a pair. These dominants accounted for 88–100% of a pair's total recorded contact calls. This gave an estimated value of 1–2.5 dominant call types per bird, with a mean ± SE of 1.46 ± 0.13, for the 24 birds (12 focal pairs) examined. Diversity

Acknowledgments

We thank Roger Blanco Segura of the ACG for his support throughout the project and help in obtaining permits, Hugo Guadamuz Rojas for his expertise in locating breeding sites, Anik Clemons and Meade Krosby for field assistance in the spring of 2000, Amy Kelsey, Rodd Kelsey and Marissa Azzara for field assistance in the summer of 1997, Meade Krosby and Amy Therrell for laboratory assistance and Peter Tyack, Doug Nelson, an anonymous referee and assorted colleagues for helpful comments on the

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