Abstract
Red deer stags (Cervus elaphus) give two distinct types of roars during the breeding season, the “common roar” and the “harsh roar.” Harsh roars are more frequent during contexts of intense competition, and characterized by a set of features that increase their perceptual salience, suggesting that they signal heightened arousal. While common roars have been shown to encode size information and mediate both male competition and female choice, to our knowledge, the specific function of harsh roars during male competition has not yet been studied. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that the specific structure of male harsh roars signals high arousal to competitors. We contrast the behavioral responses of free ranging, harem-holding stags to the playback of harsh roars from an unfamiliar competitor with their response to the playback of common roars from the same animal. We show that males react less strongly to sequences of harsh roars than to sequences of common roars, possibly because they are reluctant to escalate conflicts with highly motivated and threatening unfamiliar males in the absence of visual information. While future work should investigate the response of stags to harsh roars from familiar opponents, our observations remain consistent with the hypothesis that harsh roars may signal motivation during male competition, and illustrate how intrasexual selection can contribute to the diversification of male vocal signals.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Royal Parks of London and Simon Richards for granting access to the deer and John Bartram, head Gamekeeper at Richmond Park, for facilitating our observations. We also thank Solène Derville for helping with double-coding the videos. Finally, we thank four anonymous referees for their very insightful comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. B. D. C. was financially supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship. W. T. F was financially supported by an ERC Advanced Grant 230604 SOMACCA.
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Communicated by: Sven Thatje
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Garcia, M., Wyman, M.T., Charlton, B.D. et al. Response of red deer stags (Cervus elaphus) to playback of harsh versus common roars. Naturwissenschaften 101, 851–854 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-014-1217-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-014-1217-8