ArticleAnimal cognition2021
Long-term stability of vocal individuality cues in a territorial and monogamous seabird.
Article in Animal cognition, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Duets convey information about pair and individual identities in a Neotropical bird.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Accelerando and crescendo in African penguin ecstatic display songs.Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences · 2025Article
- Nonlinear vocal phenomena in African penguin begging calls: occurrence, significance and potential applications.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- An evolutionary model of rhythmic accelerando in animal vocal signalling.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Gharial acoustic signaling: Novel underwater pops are temporally based, context-dependent, seasonally stable, male-specific, and individually distinctive.Journal of anatomy · 2025Article
- Long distance calls: Negligible information loss of little auk social vocalisations due to high frequency propagation losses.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Vocal tract shape variation contributes to individual vocal identity in African penguins.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Penguins perceive variations of source- and filter-related vocal parameters of species-specific vocalisations.Animal cognition · 2023Article
- Cross-modal individual recognition in the African penguin and the effect of partnership.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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Abstract
The stability of individual acoustic features is fundamental in social species, and more importantly in monogamous and territorial species, showing long-term fidelity both to the partner and the breeding site. In this study, the stability over time of two discrete vocal types was investigated in the African penguin (Spheniscus demersus), a monogamous and territorial seabird. Contact calls and ecstatic display songs were recorded from an ex situ colony in 2017 and in 2020. For each vocalisation, we measured 14 spectral and temporal acoustic parameters related to both source and filter components. Two separate leave-one-out cross-validated Discriminant Function Analyses (DFA) were then performed, generating the discriminant functions from the vocalisations collected in 2017 to classify those recorded in 2020. The DFA correctly classified 62% of the contact calls (10 subjects) and 80.9% of the ecstatic display songs (seven subjects) according to the correct emitter, showing that acoustic cues to individuality encoded in both vocal types remained unchanged over four consecutive breeding seasons. We suggest that, in this monogamous and territorial bird species, individual acoustic stability could be selected for to identify groupmates and neighbours over the years and to help couples to reunite in consecutive breeding seasons, increasing individual fitness.
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