Published in Folia Primatologica
Only a handful of primate taxa use ultrasonic vocalisations (those ≥20 kHz) to communicate. The extent and uses of ultrasonic communication remain poorly understood, potentially ranging from echolocation, advertisement of reproductive status and resource availability, social cohesion, to predator avoidance. Here, using active acoustics whereby the ...
Published in Folia Primatologica
Auditory, visual and olfactory cues play varying roles in non-human primate communication, and these systems have been intensively studied over the last several decades. The use of vocalisations as a primary mode of communication has been the focus of much research, especially in attempts to understand the origins of human language, with a major fo...
Published in Folia Primatologica
Describing primate biodiversity is one of the main goals in primatology. Species are the fundamental unit of study in phylogeny, behaviour, ecology and conservation. Identifying species boundaries is particularly challenging for nocturnal taxa where only subtle morphological variation is present. Traditionally, vocal signals have been used to ident...
Published in Folia Primatologica
Like other nocturnal primates, many species of galago (Galagidae) are phenotypically cryptic, making their taxonomic status difficult to resolve. Recent taxonomic work has disentangled some of the confusion. This has resulted in an increase in the number of recognised galago species. The most widespread galago species, and indeed the most widesprea...
Published in Folia Primatologica
It has been proposed that primates use advertisement calls exclusively to negotiate spacing, but the function of female calls has rarely been studied. Here, we investigated the function of male and female advertisement calls in the northern giant mouse lemur (Mirza zaza),a non-gregarious nocturnal primate from north-western Madagascar. We recorded ...
Published in Folia Primatologica
Scent marking is a well-established, but highly variable, mode of communication among strepsirrhine primates. We begin by reviewing this literature, focusing on nocturnal species. Our understanding about the information content of scent signals and the factors driving species diversity remains incomplete, owing to difficulties in acquiring comparat...
Published in Folia Primatologica
Stereotypical vocalisations can facilitate long-distance communication in dense and, thus, sound-degrading forest habitats. Despite this, primate vocal repertoires often also include gradations between different call types that are used in social interactions. Because many nocturnal primates show a solitary social structure, it has been difficult t...
Published in Folia Primatologica
Recently it has been noted that Gursky’s spectral tarsier emits ultrasonic calls. Because high-frequency sounds are capable of travelling only short distances, their function is limited by the distance the sound can be discerned. One possible function for these short-distance, high-frequency sounds is that they might be used by the tarsiers to navi...
Published in Folia Primatologica
Vocal repertoires and call structure can provide insights into the behaviour and evolution of species, as well as aid in taxonomic classification. Nocturnal primates have large vocal repertoires. This suggests that acoustic communication plays an important role in their life histories. Little is known about the behavioural context or the intraspeci...
Published in Folia Primatologica
Crypsis, including visual and auditory concealment, usually manifests in primates as an antipredator strategy. Other factors may also influence cryptic communication style, including habitat structure and phylogenetic history. Compared to less cryptic lowland Sulawesian tarsiers, montane pygmy tarsiers (Tarsius pumilus) exhibit a communication styl...
