Male Blue Monkeys Alarm Call In Response To Danger Experienced By Others

Main Category: Veterinary
Also Included In: Biology / Biochemistry
Article Date: 23 Jul 2008 - 3:00 PDT

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Primate vocal behaviour is often said to be biologically hard-wired. According to this idea, individuals produce calls from a limited repertoire, and mostly to evolutionarily important events, such as discovery of food or a predator.

In doing so, they are thought to have little or no awareness of their audience and how listeners might be affected by their calls. In this paper, we show that male blue monkeys of Budongo Forest, Uganda, adjust their own alarm call rates depending on the predator threat that other group members experience.

In playback experiments, males gave signficantly more alarm calls when their fellow group members were dangerously close to a suspected crowned eagle, compared to when they were further away.

Since this effect was independent of the calling male's own distance to the danger, the study provides some evidence that non-human primates are able to take others into account when producing vocalisations.

Royal Society journal Biology Letters

Biology Letters publishes short, innovative and cutting-edge research articles and opinion pieces accessible to scientists from across the biological sciences. The journal is characterised by stringent peer-review, rapid publication and broad dissemination of succinct high-quality research communications.

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