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Vocal repertoire ontogeny of the captive Asian house shrew Suncus murinus suggests that the male courtship call develops from the caravanning call of the young

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Abstract

Soricids produce a considerable variety of vocalizations. However, these calls have been studied insufficiently with the exception of echolocation calls. In this study, 1,645 calls from 18 juvenile, ten sub-adult and 36 adult Asian house shrews (Suncus murinus) were acoustically and statistically analyzed to describe this species’ vocal repertoire and its ontogeny. The vocal repertoire of S. murinus includes 17 call types, seven tonal (whistle, chirp, twitter, whimper, squeak, scream and short scream) and ten non-tonal (churr, shriek, babble, click, boom, snort, screech, short screech, sniff and low click), of which ten call types (whimper, squeak, scream, short scream, churr, babble, snort, short screech, sniff and low click) were newly described by this study. This relatively extensive vocal repertoire, including one call type emitted during collective resting, indicates that this species possibly possesses a higher degree of sociality and cohesiveness than previously expected. High structural similarities were observed between calls produced by juveniles and sub-adults during caravanning and those produced by adult males during courtship. Therefore, the results of this study support a previously suggested hypothesis that in shrews, adult courtship calls are derived from calls emitted by the young. The results of this study also showed that the largest changes in the ontogeny of the vocal repertoire occurred at approximately 10 days old and was in close connection to the eyes opening. The results are discussed with available information on the vocal repertoires of other soricids.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Michaela Procházková and Jan Procházka for allowing me to work with their shrews. I am also grateful to Vladimír Vohralík, Ilya Volodin, Elena Volodina and Vera Matrosova for their help with the literature and to the three anonymous referees for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. During the study, I followed the “Guidelines for the treatment of animals in behavioural research and teaching” (Anim. Behav. 71: 245–253) and the laws of the Czech Republic, the country where the research was conducted. The research was partially supported by the Foundation “Nadání Josefa, Marie a Zdeňky Hlávkových”.

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  1. Department of Game Management and Wildlife Biology, Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences, Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, Kamýcká 129, Prague, 165 21, Czech Republic

    Irena Schneiderová

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  1. Irena Schneiderová
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Correspondence to Irena Schneiderová.

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Communicated by: Karol Zub

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Schneiderová, I. Vocal repertoire ontogeny of the captive Asian house shrew Suncus murinus suggests that the male courtship call develops from the caravanning call of the young. Acta Theriol 59, 149–164 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13364-013-0141-1

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