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Individuality, species-specific features, and female discrimination of male southern white rhinoceros courtship calls

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Abstract

Male vocalizations associated with courtship can play a key role in mate selection. They may help females obtain information about males’ quality and identity and/or may contain species-specific properties that help prevent interspecies breeding. Despite vocalizations being a prominent part of the courtship of white rhinos, the role that they play in white rhino breeding behaviour has not been extensively studied. Both southern (SWR) and critically endangered northern white rhino (NWR) males intensively vocalize during courtship with hic calls. We examined these calls and found that call properties differed between NWR and SWR males. In addition, we found that individual SWR males could be identified with a high degree of accuracy using their hic calls and that the signature information capacity in hic calls would allow females to individually recognize about 11 adult males living in or moving through their home-ranges, which may help with mate selection. Then, we conducted playback experiments with wild anoestrus SWR females. The females discriminated between the NWR and SWR hic calls and between the SWR hic and SWR pant calls. However, we only found differences in the latency of observed behaviours, not in their duration or in the intensity of females’ reaction. This might suggest that females which are not in oestrus are not highly responsive to a male’s motivation (i.e., seeking contact or mating), but are more interested in assessing his dominance status or familiarity. Ultimately, our results indicate that courtship hic calls encode information which might help females choose mating partners.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Ezemvelo KwaZulu-Natal Wildlife (EKZNW) for permission to work in Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park and Dave Druce and Jed Bird (EKZNW) for logistical support during our study. We are thankful to Stanislav Bureš (Palacký University Olomouc) for his support of this study and to Richard Policht (Czech University of Life Sciences Prague) for providing recordings of two northern white rhino males. Two anonymous referees provided valuable comments, which helped to improve the manuscript.

Funding

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation (Grant to A.M.S: 114622) and by Mark McCann. I.C. was supported by the Department of Zoology, Palacký University Olomouc and the Internal Grant Agency of Palacký University Olomouc (IGA_PrF_2017_023, IGA_PrF_2018_026).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Life Sciences, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa

    Ivana Cinková & Adrian M. Shrader

  2. Department of Zoology and Laboratory of Ornithology, Faculty of Science, Palacký University Olomouc, Olomouc, Czech Republic

    Ivana Cinková

  3. Department of Zoology and Entomology, Mammal Research Institute, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

    Adrian M. Shrader

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  1. Ivana Cinková
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Contributions

IC conceived the study and IC and AMS designed it. IC performed data collection and analysis. The first draft was written by IC and AMS commented on and edited previous versions of the manuscript. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Ivana Cinková.

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The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethics approval

The experimental procedures were approved by the Animal Ethics Committee of University of KwaZulu-Natal and given the reference number AREC/001/017. This work followed the ASAB/ABS (2017) guidelines for the treatment of animals in behavioural research and teaching.

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Cinková, I., Shrader, A.M. Individuality, species-specific features, and female discrimination of male southern white rhinoceros courtship calls. Anim Cogn 25, 769–782 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01591-4

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