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Agonistic vocalization behaviour in the male ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta)

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Abstract

Vocalizations are used by group-living animals as aggressive and submissive signals during agonistic interactions, and are also used to maintain dominance hierarchies in many species. For gregarious strepsirrhines with large vocal repertoires and differentiated dominance ranks like the ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), agonistic vocalization use is important to study to better understand their social adaptations.To determine whether ring-tailed lemur vocalizations such as the yip, cackle, twitter, chutter, and plosive bark were used as aggressive or submissive signals during agonism and uttered at different rates by males of differing dominance ranks and ages, 565 h of focal data were collected on 31 individual males aged ≥ 1 year from Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve, Madagascar. Yip, cackle, and twitter vocalizations were consistently used during agonistic submissive interactions with both males and females, chutter vocalizations were used during aggressive agonistic interactions with males and submissive agonistic interactions with males and females, and plosive bark vocalizations were used across behavioural contexts but not particularly during agonism. Males of all ages employed all vocalizations, and while low-ranking males uttered yip calls at higher rates, males of all dominance ranks uttered cackle, twitter, chutter, and plosive bark vocalizations. These results advance our knowledge of how male lemurs utilize agonistic vocalizations to maintain inter-individual relationships with males and females, and improve our overall understanding of the function of different agonistic vocalizations in wild lemurs.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jacky Ibrahim Antho Youssouf and Andry Randrianandrasana at the Beza Mahafaly Special Reserve, Madagascar Institut pour la Conservation des Ecosystèmes Tropicaux, and Jeannin Rainavanosy and Joel Ratsirarson at the Département des Eaux et Forêts de l’Ecole Supérieure des Sciences Agronomiques (ESSA) and Madagascar National Parks (MNP) (formerly l'Association Nationale pour la Gestion des Aires Protégées; ANGAP) for their facilitation of this project. I thank Enafa, Elahavelo, Efitiria, Edouard, Ralaevo, and Monja of the Beza Mahafaly Ecological Monitoring Team for field assistance, and Michelle Sauther and Frank Cuozzo for sharing ring-tailed lemur age data. I am grateful to Ryan Janzen and Heather Hummel for their companionship and stimulating conversation during COVID-19 lockdown, while I wrote this paper. I also thank Eugenia Tsao for technological support and Joyce Parga for mentorship. Finally, I thank the editor-in-chief, associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers, whose comments have improved this paper. Funding was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship, Doctoral Award), the American Museum of Natural History, Ontario Graduate Scholarships, the Edward. J. Noble Foundation, the St. Catherines Island Foundation, General Motors Women in Science, and the University of Toronto.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Laura M. Bolt

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The data collection adhered to the legal requirements of Madagascar. Data were collected with the approval of ESSA and MNP (formerly ANGAP). This research complied with the ethical standards for the treatment of animals corresponding with the guidelines laid down by the Primate Society of Japan, the National Institutes of Health (USA), and the European Commission. The research protocol met all the aforementioned guidelines for the use of animals in research and was approved by the University of Toronto Animal Care Committee.

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Bolt, L.M. Agonistic vocalization behaviour in the male ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta). Primates 62, 417–430 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-020-00878-3

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