Pulse register phonation in Diana monkey alarm calls

Social familiarity affects Diana monkey (Cercopithecus diana diana) alarm call responses in habitat-specific ways.

Male Diana monkeys produce loud and acoustically distinct alarm calls to leopards and eagles that propagate over long distances, much beyond the immediate group. Calling is often contagious, with neighbouring males responding to each other's calls, indicating that harem males communicate both to local group members and distant competitors. Here, we tested whether male Diana monkeys responding t...

Diana monkey long-distance calls: messages for conspecifics and predators

Primate long-distance calls have typically been interpreted as communication signals between conspecific groups (the ‘resource defence hypothesis’), but their potential role as anti-predator alarm calls has received comparably little attention. Male diana monkeys, Cercopithecus diana diana, in the Taï forest of Côte d’Ivoire often utter long-distance calls, either spontaneously or in reaction t...

Evidence for semantic communication in titi monkey alarm calls

Alarm Calls

Animals commonly vocalize when threatened by a predator. These signals, usually termed alarm calls (from old Italian all arme ‘to arms’ on the approach of an enemy), have continued to bewilder and fascinate for a number of reasons, the first of which is mainly practical. In animal research, it is often difficult to break down the continuous behavioral stream into discrete and meaningful units, ...

Hornbills can distinguish between primate alarm calls.

Some mammals distinguish between and respond appropriately to the alarm calls of other mammal and bird species. However, the ability of birds to distinguish between mammal alarm calls has not been investigated. Diana monkeys (Cercopithecus diana) produce different alarm calls to two predators: crowned eagles (Stephanoaetus coronatus) and leopards (Panthera pardus). Yellow-casqued hornbills (Cer...