Vervet monkey alarm calls: Setting the historical context

Evidence for semantic communication in titi monkey alarm calls

Initiating language in LIDA: learning the meaning of vervet alarm calls

This paper initiates language in LIDA by using the Learning Intelligent Decision Agent’s (LIDA) perceptual learning mechanism to suggest how an infant vervet, Chlorocebus pygerthrus, learns the meanings of vervet monkey alarm calls. We consider a multiple meanings approach which includes a feeling-based meaning, an action-based meaning, and a referential meaning. Simulations first test the lear...

The assessment by vervet monkeys of their own and another species' alarm calls

In Amboseli National Park, Kenya, both superb starlings, Spreo superbus, and vervet monkeys, Cercopithecus aethiops, give acoustically different alarm calls to different classes of predators. The 'raptor alarms' of starlings and vervet monkeys are so called because they are given exclusively to avian species that attack from the air. In contrast, while vervets give 'leopard alarms' to a narrow ...

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, ...

"Intestinal spirochaetosis" of the vervet monkey.

Electron microscopy revealed that 80% of captured vervet monkeys, held in quarantine for experimental use, showed extensive proliferation of spiral-shaped bacteria on the mucosal epithelium of the large bowel. A consortium, consisting of a predominant spirillum together with a spirochaete, was usually seen as a lawn covering the colonic epithelium. Sparsely populated areas showed preferential c...