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The Vocal Repertoire of Golden-Faced Sakis, Pithecia chrysocephala, and the Relationship Between Context and Call Structure

Authors:
Jen Muir
Jen Muir
Adrian A. Barnett at Federal University of Pernambuco
Adrian A. Barnett
Magdalena S Svensson at Oxford Brookes University
Magdalena S Svensson
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Abstract and Figures

Vocalizations are a vital form of communication. Call structure and use may change depending on emotional arousal, behavioral context, sex, or social complexity. Pithecia chrysocephala (golden-faced sakis) are a little-studied Neotropical species. We aimed to determine the vocal repertoire of P. chrysocephala and the influence of context on call structure. We collected data June–August 2018 in an urban secondary forest fragment in Manaus, Amazonian Brazil. We took continuous vocal recordings in 10-min blocks with 5-min breaks during daily follows of two groups. We recorded scan samples of group behavior at the start and end of blocks and used ad libitum behavioral recording during blocks. We collected 70 h of data and analyzed 1500 calls. Lowest frequencies ranged 690.1–5879 Hz in adults/subadults and 5393.6–9497.8Hz in the only juvenile sampled. We identified eight calls, three of which were juvenile specific. We found that, while repertoire size was similar to that of other New World monkeys of similar group size and structure, it also resembled those with larger group sizes and different social structures. The durations of Chuck calls were shorter for feeding contexts compared to hostile, but frequencies were higher than predicted if call structure reflects motivation. This finding may be due to the higher arousal involved in hostile situations, or because P. chrysocephala use Chuck calls in appeasement, similar to behavior seen in other primates. Call structures did not differ between sexes, potentially linked to the limited size dimorphism in this species. Our findings provide a foundation for further investigation of Pithecia vocal behavior and phylogeny, as well as applications for both captive welfare (stress relief) and field research (playbacks for surveys).
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The Vocal Repertoire of Golden-Faced Sakis, Pithecia
chrysocephala, and the Relationship
Between Context and Call Structure
Jen Muir, et al. [full author details at the end of the article]
Received: 5 June 2019 / Accepted: 1 December 2019
#Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Vocalizations are a vital form of communication. Call structure and use may change
depending on emotional arousal, behavioral context, sex, or social complexity. Pithecia
chrysocephala (golden-faced sakis) are a little-studied Neotropical species. We aimed
to determine the vocal repertoire of P. chrysocephala and the influence of context on
call structure. We collected data June–August 2018 in an urban secondary forest
fragment in Manaus, Amazonian Brazil. We took continuous vocal recordings in 10-
min blocks with 5-min breaks during daily follows of two groups. We recorded scan
samples of group behavior at the start and end of blocks and used ad libitum behavioral
recording during blocks. We collected 70 h of data and analyzed 1500 calls. Lowest
frequencies ranged 690.1–5879 Hz in adults/subadults and 5393.6–9497.8Hz in the
only juvenile sampled. We identified eight calls, three of which were juvenile specific.
We found that, while repertoire size was similar to that of other New World monkeys of
similar group size and structure, it also resembled those with larger group sizes and
different social structures. The durations of Chuck calls were shorter for feeding
contexts compared to hostile, but frequencies were higher than predicted if call
structure reflects motivation. This finding may be due to the higher arousal involved
in hostile situations, or because P. chrysocephala use Chuck calls in appeasement,
similar to behavior seen in other primates. Call structures did not differ between sexes,
potentially linked to the limited size dimorphism in this species. Our findings provide a
foundation for further investigation of Pithecia vocal behavior and phylogeny, as well
as applications for both captive welfare (stress relief) and field research (playbacks for
surveys).
Keywords Behavior .Communication .Neotropics .Pitheciidae .We l f are
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-019-00125-7
Handling Editor: Joanna M. Setchell
/Published online: 4 January 2020
International Journal of Primatology (2019) 40:721–743
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
... We collected vocalisation data for Pithecia chrysocephala in June-August 2018 in Manaus, Brazil (-3.083, 59.983) (for methodology and vocal repertoire see Muir et al., 2019). We then gathered vocalisation data on two other Pithecia species from previous published studies, which we re-analysed and compared across species. ...
... Table 1. The complete adult vocal repertoires of P. chrysocephala, P. pithecia, and P. aequatorialis as recorded by Muir et al. (2019), Henline (2007), and Keiran (2012). P. aequatorialis calls were not put into groups within their study and so have been grouped according to their similarity to the others based on their description and/or behavioural context. ...
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