Margarita Briseño Jaramillo

• PhD in Biology - Animal Behaviour
• Research Assistant at University of Veracruz

In May and June 2024, a die-off of Mexican mantled howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata mexicana) occurred in southern Mexico. This commentary documents the event, attributing it to extreme heatwaves, drought, wildfires, and habitat impoverishment. Despite their reported resilience to habitat disturbances, mantled howler monkey mortality rate in some...

Objectives When the production of antipredator behaviors is costly, prey is expected to stop displaying such behaviors and lose the ability to recognize extirpated predators. However, the loss or maintenance of predator recognition abilities is conditional on the eco‐evolutionary context of prey. Here, we examined the behavioral responses of naïve...

There are hundreds of extant species of primate. Is it a coincidence that the only known species to develop fluid speech was part of the species-poor primate clade characterized by substantially greater relative body size? In this position paper, we discuss pertinent evidence from four species of American monkey, seven species of Afroeurasian monke...

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has become an important tool for surveying birds, and there is a growing demand for approaches to obtain abundance and behavioural information from PAM recordings. Changes in bird populations have been assessed by counting recorded calls and calculating the vocal activity rate (VAR, i.e. the number of calls per rec...

The ‘social complexity hypothesis' posits that complex social systems (which entail high uncertainty) require complex communicative systems (with high vocal flexibility). In species with fission–fusion dynamics, where the fluid composition of temporary subgroups increases the uncertainty with which group members must manage their social relationshi...

Shared habitats between humans and other animals are increasing in the twenty-first century, which may require behavioral flexibility from animal species to adjust to these new environments. We evaluated the effects of anthropogenic pressure on Geoffroy’s spider monkeys (Ateles geoffroyi) in a low-impact tourism area. Over the course of 18 months,...

The ‘social complexity hypothesis’ posits that complex social systems (that entail high uncertainty) require complex communicative systems (with high vocal flexibility). In species with fission-fusion dynamics, where the fluid composition of temporary subgroups increases the uncertainty with which group members must manage their social relationship...

Animal communication has long been thought to be subject to pressures and constraints associated with social relationships. However, our understanding of how the nature and quality of social relationships relates to the use and evolution of communication is limited by a lack of directly comparable methods across multiple levels of analysis. Here, w...

“Conversation rules” such as overlap avoidance and coordinated overlap have been reported in nonhuman animals, and seem to be adaptive responses to the requirements of social life. Some species display both patterns in an apparently flexible way, but the social factors mediating their respective usage remain poorly documented. We investigated the p...

Nonhuman primates’ vocal repertoire has shown little plasticity, with immatures producing adult-like acoustic structures. Yet, the use of different call types shows a degree of socially dependent flexibility during development. In several nonhuman primate species, group members exchange contact calls respecting a set of social and temporal rules th...

Alouatta species utter the most powerful primate vocalizations in the Neotropics and are well-known for their loud and long-lasting male howling bouts. However, the diversity of acoustic structures used in these howling bouts, as well as in non-howling contexts, and the relative contribution of the different group members to the entire vocal repert...

Social traditions based on communication signals are widespread in birds, cetaceans and humans, but surprisingly rare in nonhuman primates known for having genetically-determined vocal repertoires. This study presents the first description of a singular case of behaviour associated with calling (placing a hand in front of the mouth while vocalizing...

Diurnal animals also produce sounds at night. In several roosting species, high vocal activity at the roosting site seems to be a prerequisite to sleep, suggesting a role of vocal chorusing in coordinating resting activities. Dolphins’ nocturnal vocal activity has been rarely investigated. However, this animal model is interesting because: dolphin...

La reconnaissance auditive entre les membres d’un groupe est importante pour maintenir une cohésion socio-spatiale chez les espèces forestières où la visibilité dans l’habitat est limitée, mais cela peut aller au-delà du groupe chez les espèces territoriales avec la nécessité de reconnaître ses voisins. Nous avons évalué la capacité à reconnaître i...

Recognizing individuals auditorily is of primal im-portance in maintaining socio-spatial cohesion among con-specifics within a social group as well as for regulating space use among neighbours, particularly for species dwelling in forests where visual communication is constrained. This study evaluates the capacity of black howler monkeys (Alouatta...

Abstract Recognizing individuals auditorily is of primal importance in maintaining socio-spatial cohesion among conspecifics within a social group as well as for regulating space use among neighbours, particularly for species dwelling in forests where visual communication is constrained. This study evaluates the capacity of black howler monkeys (Al...

Nocturnal vocal activity in dolphins is often thought to be associated with feeding activity. However, when no food resources are available dolphins spend their time for the most part resting/sleeping. While unihemispherically sleeping, dolphins mostly swim slowly and synchronously in close proximity with one or more other individuals. Although voc...

Nocturnal vocal activity in dolphins is often thought to be associated with feeding activity. However, when no food resources are available dolphins spend their time for the most part resting/sleeping. While unihemispherically sleeping, dolphins mostly swim slowly and synchronously in close proximity with one or more other individuals. Although voc...

We review four studies investigating hand preferences for grasping versus pointing to objects at several spatial positions in human infants and three species of nonhuman primates using the same experimental setup. We expected that human infants and nonhuman primates present a comparable difference in their pattern of laterality according to tasks....

Diurnal animals produce sounds at night. In roosting species, high vocal activity at roosting sites may be a prerequisite to sleep, suggesting a role of chorusing in coordinating resting. In other species, vocalizations during sleep are commonly reported, which in humans correspond to dream contents. Dolphins’ nocturnal vocal activity has been rare...

Delphinids are able to copy sounds from their environment that are not produced by conspecifics. So far these mimicries occur associated with the context in which they were learned. No separation between auditory memory formation and spontaneous vocal copying was observed as it is for example in songbirds. In our study we report that bottlenose dol...

It is known that delphinidae can associate heard sounds with salient events/objects and mimic these sounds, mostly in the corresponding context. Thus, one can wonder whether dolphins, as other animals and humans, have a sort of sensory memory of events. Here we show that a group of five bottlenose dolphins in the Planète Sauvage dolphinarium (Franc...

Alban Lemasson and Martine Hausberger have contributed equally to this work. The mechanisms underlying vocal mimicry in animals remain an open question. Delphinidae are able to copy sounds from their environment that are not produced by conspecifics. Usually, these mimicries occur associated with the context in which they were learned. No reports a...

The mechanisms underlying vocal mimicry in animals remain an open question. Delphinidae are able to copy sounds from their environment that are not produced by conspecifics. Usually, these mimicries occur associated with the context in which they were learned. No reports address the question of separation between auditory memory formation and spont...

Example 2 of a Planète Sauvage dolphins’ WLP slowed down (factor of 0.5).

Example 1 of a Planète Sauvage dolphins’ WLP (“whale-like” production).

Example 1 of a Planète Sauvage dolphins’ WLP slowed down (factor of 0.5).

Example 2 of a Planète Sauvage dolphins’ WLP.