Call combinations, vocal exchanges and interparty movement in wild bonobos
Section snippets
Data Collection
Bonobos form long-term, stable communities in which all members share a home range and form an exclusive reproductive unit (Kano, 1992). Within a community, individuals form temporary subgroups, or ‘parties’, that travel and forage separately from other parties. Parties are unpredictable in size (ranging from one individual to the entire community), duration (lasting from several minutes to several days) and composition (because animals do not always form a party with the same individuals).
For
High Hoots and Whistle–High Hoot Combinations
A common vocalization among bonobos is the high hoot (HH) (Fig. 1a), a loud, tonal call (de Waal, 1988) given in a variety of nonaggressive contexts, and occurring in bouts consisting of 1–27 acoustic units (Hohmann & Fruth, 1994), each with an inverted U-shaped frequency contour. High hoots are audible for at least 700 m in the forest (I. Schamberg, personal observation). They appear to be individually distinctive, and previous research suggests that they may facilitate the joining of
Discussion
Bonobos use call combinations, call exchanges and call subtypes to coordinate their movement between parties. Callers were significantly more likely to travel to a new party after producing W + HHs than after producing HHs alone. They were especially likely to move to another party if their initial vocalizations elicited an answer (i.e. was part of a vocal exchange). Individuals also modified the acoustic structure of their call combinations in a manner that could have allowed listeners to
Acknowledgments
We thank the Institut Congolais pour la Conservation de la Nature (ICCN) for permission to conduct research in D.R. Congo. We are grateful to Lys Alcayna for data collection in the field and Robyn Thiessen-Bock for drawing our attention to the W+HH combination. We also want to thank Emily Bray, Andy Gersick and Noah Synder-Mackler for their assistance, feedback and support. Research was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (I.S.) and grants from the Leaky
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