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Investigating Individual Vocal Signatures and Small-Scale Patterns of Geographic Variation in Female Bornean Gibbon (Hylobates muelleri) Great Calls

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Abstract

Quantifying patterns of variation in primate vocalizations has important implications for understanding the evolutionary processes that lead to variation in phenotypic traits more broadly. Here, we investigated individuality and patterns of geographic variation across a small geographic scale (ca. 10 km) in female Bornean gibbon (Hylobates muelleri) great calls. We analyzed calls recorded from wild, unhabituated gibbon groups at the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems site in Sabah, Malaysia. We estimated 23 acoustic features in 376 great calls from 33 different females. We used linear discriminant function analysis to investigate intra- and interindividual variation in great calls. To examine small-scale patterns of geographic variation great calls we investigated measures of acoustic dissimilarity as a function of distance. We found that temporal features (such as the duration of the notes and the duration of rest between notes) contributed substantially to individuality. We were able to identify females based on their calls with 95.7% accuracy using leave-one-out cross-validation. We found no discernible patterns of geographic variation at our site; females with neighboring territories were just as likely to have similar calls as females with more distant territories. It is possible that we did not sample across a large enough geographic range, or that substantial interindividual variation effectively swamped across-site patterns of variation. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence for individual vocal signatures in primates and mammals, but further research is needed to understand the evolutionary mechanisms that contribute to individuality in gibbon calls.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Mark N. Grote for his statistical support and guidance. Funding to conduct this research was kindly provided by Primate Conservation, Inc., Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, the American Primatological Association, and the Fulbright US Student Program. We also gratefully acknowledge Rob Ewers of Imperial College London for providing logistical support for the completion of this project. We thank all of the staff at the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems project and the South East Asia Rainforest Research Programme (SEARRP) management, particularly the many research assistants who helped with data collection including M. Ramadhan, S. Watson, R. Grey, M. Khoo, S. Rao, K. Kramarczuk, and C. Sullivan. Two anonymous reviewers, as well as the editor, provided invaluable comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Dena J. Clink & Margaret C. Crofoot

  2. Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation, Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS), Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia

    Henry Bernard

  3. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Ancon, Panama, Republic of Panama

    Margaret C. Crofoot

  4. Department of Anthropology, Program in the Environment, and School for Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Andrew J. Marshall

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  1. Dena J. Clink
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Correspondence to Dena J. Clink.

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The research complied with all applicable laws in Malaysia and the United States of America. Permission to conduct research at the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems site was kindly granted by the Sabah Biodiversity Centre JKM/MBS 1000–2/2(90).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Clink, D.J., Bernard, H., Crofoot, M.C. et al. Investigating Individual Vocal Signatures and Small-Scale Patterns of Geographic Variation in Female Bornean Gibbon (Hylobates muelleri) Great Calls. Int J Primatol 38, 656–671 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-017-9972-y

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