Abstract
Male copulation calls sometimes play important roles in sexual strategies, attracting conspecific females or advertising their social status to conspecific males. These calls generally occur in sexually competitive societies such as harem groups and multi-male and multi-female societies. However, the call functions remain unclear because of limited availability of data sets that include a large number of male and female animals in naturalistic environments, particularly in primates. Here, we examined the possible function of male-specific copulation calls in wild stump-tailed macaques (Macaca arctoides) by analyzing the contexts and acoustic features of vocalizations. We observed 395 wild stump-tailed macaques inhabiting the Khao Krapuk Khao Taomor Non-Hunting Area in Thailand and recorded all occurrences of observed copulations. We counted 446 male-specific calls in 383 copulations recorded, and measured their acoustic characteristics. Data were categorized into three groups depending on their social status: dominant (alpha and coalition) males and non-dominant males. When comparing male status, alpha males most frequently produced copulation calls at ejaculation, coalition males produced less frequent calls than alpha males, and other non-dominant males rarely vocalized, maintaining silence even when mounting females. Acoustic analysis indicated no significant influence of status (alpha or coalition) on call number, bout duration, or further formant dispersion parameters. Our results suggest that male copulation calls of this species are social status-dependent signals. Furthermore, dominant males might actively transmit their social status and copulations to other male rivals to impede their challenging attacks, while other non-dominant males maintain silence to prevent the interference of dominants.
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23 May 2020
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Notes
The social tactics of “coalition” in stump-tailed macaques in this area are highly interesting, but the analysis, results, and discussions of these social tactics should be reported in another paper. Accordingly, we did not mention the details of the coalition phenomena, and only cited our preprint manuscript (Toyoda et al. 2020), including the actual data and its tentative discussions.
See the legend for Table 1.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Warayut Nilpaung, Chuchat Choklap, the superintendent of the Khao Krapuk Khao Taomor Non-Hunting Area; Phanlerd Inprasoet, Wanchai Inprasoet, and Napatchaya Techaatiwatkun for providing valuable support that ensured the success of our fieldwork; Dr. Yuzuru Hamada, Dr. Takeshi Furuichi, Dr. Ikuma Adachi, and Dr. Takeshi Nishimura for their support in our research. Our deepest appreciation goes to three anonymous reviewers for their comments/suggestions. This study was funded by the JSPS KAKENHI (nos. 18H03503 and 16H04848 to HK, no. 16J0098 to AT, no. 19KK0191 to AT and HK), Young Science Explorer Grant of the National Geographic Foundation for Science and Exploration–Asia (to AT), Kyoto University Foundation (to AT), the Cooperative Research Programs of the Wildlife Research Center and Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University (to AT), Japan Science and Technology Agency Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology 17941861 (no. JPMJCR17A4), and Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Innovative Areas no. 4903 (Evolinguistics) 17H06380 to HK (as co-PI).
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Supplementary video S1. Sample video clips of a male copulatory vocalization episode in which an adult male (alpha male) is mounting a female (WMV 8739 kb)
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Toyoda, A., Maruhashi, T., Malaivijitnond, S. et al. Dominance status and copulatory vocalizations among male stump-tailed macaques in Thailand. Primates 61, 685–694 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-020-00820-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10329-020-00820-7