NDLI: Information content and acoustic structure of male African elephant social rumbles

Content Provider	PubMed Central
Author	Stoeger, Angela S. Baotic, Anton
Copyright Year	2016
Abstract	Until recently, the prevailing theory about male African elephants (Loxodonta africana) was that, once adult and sexually mature, males are solitary and targeted only at finding estrous females. While this is true during the state of ‘musth’ (a condition characterized by aggressive behavior and elevated androgen levels), ‘non-musth’ males exhibit a social system seemingly based on companionship, dominance and established hierarchies. Research on elephant vocal communication has so far focused on females, and very little is known about the acoustic structure and the information content of male vocalizations. Using the source and filter theory approach, we analyzed social rumbles of 10 male African elephants. Our results reveal that male rumbles encode information about individuality and maturity (age and size), with formant frequencies and absolute fundamental frequency values having the most informative power. This first comprehensive study on male elephant vocalizations gives important indications on their potential functional relevance for male-male and male-female communication. Our results suggest that, similar to the highly social females, future research on male elephant vocal behavior will reveal a complex communication system in which social knowledge, companionship, hierarchy, reproductive competition and the need to communicate over long distances play key roles.
Related Links	http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep27585
Starting Page	27585
File Format	PDF
ISSN	20452322
e-ISSN	20452322
Journal	Scientific Reports
Volume Number	6
Language	English
Publisher	Nature Publishing Group
Publisher Date	2016-06-01
Access Restriction	Open
Rights Holder	Nature Publishing Group
Subject Keyword	Science and technology Research in Higher Education
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Multidisciplinary

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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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