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Evidence for High Variability in Temporal Features of the Male Coda in Müller’s Bornean Gibbons (Hylobates muelleri)

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Abstract

Most pair-living primate species engage in duets, wherein males and females produce coordinated vocalizations. Previous analyses of male gibbon contributions to the duet have shown that calls are individually distinct. Here we investigate variation in the temporal and spectral parameters in the male contribution to the duet, also known as the coda, of wild, nonhabituated male Müller’s Bornean gibbons (Hylobates muelleri), recorded both opportunistically and as a response to playbacks at the Stability of Altered Forest Ecosystems site in Sabah, Malaysia. We used linear discriminant function analysis to estimate the intra- and interindividual variation in 13 spectral and temporal parameters of the vocalizations (N = 337) of 31 male gibbons. To further understand how call features vary within and between individuals we used a multivariate, variance components model to investigate how variance in features was partitioned at these two levels. We could identify males with a 66% accuracy using leave-one-out cross-validation, a relatively low score compared to female Müller’s Bornean gibbons and males of other species. We found that for some features (such as maximum frequency of the notes) most of the variance occurred between males, but for others (specifically total duration of the call and duration of rest in between notes) most of the variance occurred within a single male. Overall, male Müller’s Bornean gibbon coda vocalizations showed greater variability relative to their female counterparts, raising questions about potential differences in the function of the male and female contributions to the duet in Müller’s Bornean gibbons and the gibbon taxon as a whole.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge Dr. Mark Grote for his statistical guidance in developing the model for this project. We thank Dr. Henry Bernard for serving as our local collaborator. Endless gratitude goes to the UC Davis Provost Undergraduate Fellowship and the Explorer’s Club Youth Activity Fund for supporting A. R. Lau. We also express our immense thanks for the Fulbright Student Researcher Scholarship, the American Society of Primatologists Conservation Grant, UC Davis Summer Research Fellowship, the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo Grant, and the Primate Conservation Inc. Research Grant for providing financial support for D. J. Clink. Thank you to C. T. Lau for comments on early drafts of this article and support throughout the entirety of this project. A huge thank you goes to Dr. Joanna Setchell and two anonymous reviewers for incredibly helpful revisions of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anthropology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Allison R. Lau, Dena J. Clink & Margaret C. Crofoot

  2. California National Primate Research Center, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, 95616, USA

    Allison R. Lau

  3. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of California, Davis, Sacramento, CA, 95817, USA

    Allison R. Lau

  4. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Ancon, Panama, Republic of Panama

    Margaret C. Crofoot

  5. Department of Anthropology, Program in the Environment, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Andrew J. Marshall

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  1. Allison R. Lau
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Correspondence to Allison R. Lau.

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Handling Editor: Joanna M. Setchell

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Lau, A.R., Clink, D.J., Crofoot, M.C. et al. Evidence for High Variability in Temporal Features of the Male Coda in Müller’s Bornean Gibbons (Hylobates muelleri). Int J Primatol 39, 670–684 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-018-0061-7

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