Anatomical constraints generate honesty: acoustic cues to age and weight in the roars of red deer stags

By D. Reby, K. McComb. 2003

606 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Early work on loud calling in mammals emphasized the importance of dynamic characteristics such as calling rate as cues to fitness and fighting ability. In contrast, little is known of the potential for fine-scaled acoustic cues to provide receivers with direct information on fitness. Fundamental frequency has typically been considered a good potential indicator of body size in the literature, but resonance frequencies (formants), which should be constrained by the length of the vocal tract, have received less attention. We conducted a detailed acoustic analysis on an extensive database of roars from red deer stags, Cervus elaphus, in a free-ranging population to investigate which variables provided honest information on age, body weight and reproductive success. Although fundamental frequency was higher in young stags than in adults, it did not decrease with body weight within adults and source cues (i.e. those generated by the larynx) in general did not provide clear information on fitness-related characteristics. In contrast, minimum formant frequencies, reached during the part of the roar when the mobile larynx is most fully retracted towards the sternum, decreased with body weight and age and were strongly negatively correlated with our index of reproductive success. Such production-related acoustic cues to body size and fitness, rendered honest by an anatomical constraint limiting the downward movement of the larynx, provide receivers with accurate information that could be used to assess rivals and choose mates.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e25209853abb4a9bc46ab5a7756656a9df1a63d

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Citations in the corpus

African Elephant Vocal Communication I: Antiphonal Calling Behaviour Among Affiliated Females (2005, background): “Similarly,male reddeer produce roar vocalizations in the early assessment stage of rutting season contests, and these acoustic signals of competitive ability also influence the termination of contests before escalation (CluttonBrock & Albon 1979; Reby & McComb 2003).”
What makes a cry a cry? A review of infant distress vocalizations (2012, background): “The acoustic parameters of male mating calls have the potential to encode reliable or 'honest' information about their quality (Reby and McComb, 2003; Wyman et al., 2008; Wyman et al., 2012), which can be used by females in the context of mate choice (Charlton et al., 2007; Reby et al., 2010).”
Vocal Expression of Emotions in Mammals: Mechanisms of Production and Evidence (2012, methodology): “The source–filter theory has recently been applied to various species and revealed interesting links between vocalizations and the caller’s anatomical or physiological attributes (e.g. Reby & McComb, 2003; Briefer, Vannoni & McElligott, 2010; Briefer & McElligott, 2011; Charlton et al., 2011).”
Retraction of the mobile descended larynx during groaning enables fallow bucks (Dama dama) to lower their formant frequencies (2006, methodology): “Most evidence suggests that the evolution of the descended larynx in cervids and other mammals occurred through ‘size exaggeration’, whereby males attempt to exaggerate their perceived body size by modifying the phonic structure of their calls (Fant, 1975; Fitch & Reby, 2001; Reby & McComb, 2003a, ”
Social effects on vocal ontogeny in an ungulate, the goat, Capra hircus (2012, methodology): “The program batch-processed the editing, the setting of parameters, the ects on vocal ontogeny in an ungulate, the goat, Capra hircus, Animal analyses and the exporting of output data (Reby & McComb 2003; Charlton et al. 2009).”
Black and White Colobus Monkey (Colobus guereza) Roars as a Source of Both Honest and Exaggerated Information About Body Mass (2006, background): “It has been shown to predict body size in domestic dogs (Riede & Fitch 1999), rhesus macaques (Fitch 1997), red deer (Reby & McComb 2003a), and human men (Rendall et al. 2005).”
Vocal-Tract Resonances as Indexical Cues in Rhesus Monkeys (2007, positive): “Recent studies of red deer males during their mating season show that not only do red deer roars contain formant structures that are indicators of a male’s body size and fitness [37], but male red deer are also more attentive and, in some cases, will reply with more roars when they hear synthetic ma”
Sounds and size: identification of acoustic variables that reflect body size in hamadryas baboons, Papio hamadryas (2006, background): “…that are related to body size, because body size frequently determines fighting ability (so far shown only in males) and reproductive success (shown in both sexes; Clutton-Brock & Albon 1979; Anderson 1986; Bercovitch 1987; Kuester et al. 1995; Poole 1999; Bee & Gerhardt 2001; Reby & McComb 2003).”
The contribution of source–filter theory to mammal vocal communication research (2010, methodology): “…vocal tract is modelled as a straight uniform tube that is closed at one end and open at the other, the spacing between any two successive formants (Df ) can be approximated as a constant, and formant frequencies can be plotted as Fi ¼ Df ð2i 1Þ2 , as illustrated in Figure 3 (Reby & McComb, 2003a).”
Roars of black howler monkeys (Alouatta caraya): evidence for a function in inter-group spacing (2006, background): “In the first case the call informs about some trait of the individual/group related to its ability to defend the resource under dispute, such as size (Bee et al., 1999), weight ( Reby & McComb, 2003 ), condition (Kitchen et al., 2003), status, numbers (McComb et al., 1994; Kitchen, 2004), etc.”
Vocal and visual attractiveness are related in women (2003, background): “The minimum formant frequency is related to both body size and age in red deer, Cervus elaphus (Reby & McComb 2003).”
Vocal indicators of body size in men and women: a meta-analysis (2014, methodology): “…Harris et al., 2006; Pfefferle & Fischer, 2006; Pisanski & Rendall, 2011; Pisanski et al., 2014; Plotsky et al., 2013; Puts, Apicella, et al., 2012; Reby & McComb, 2003; Rendall et al., 2005, 2007; Riede & Fitch, 1999; Sanvito et al., 2007; Sell et al., 2010; Smith & Patterson, 2005; Taylor, Reby,…”
Vertebrate Sound Production and Acoustic Communication (2016, background): “Similar insights have been applied to both production and perception in red deer ( Cervus elaphus ; Fitch and Reby 2001 ; Reby and McComb 2003 ; Charlton et al. 2007 ), fallow deer ( Dama dama ; McElligott et al. 2006 ; Vannoni and McElligott 2007 ), and koalas ( Phascolarctos cinereus ; Charlton…”
The Evolution of Language: A Comparative Review (2005, positive): “This size exaggeration hypothesis applies not only to the nonhuman species with descended larynges (Reby and McComb 2003; Reby et al. 2005), but also accounts for the secondary human descent of the larynx seen only in males, and occurring at puberty (Fitch and Giedd 1999).”
Baboon loud calls advertise male quality: acoustic features and their relation to rank, age, and exhaustion (2004, background): “Thus, the higher F0 of high-ranking males may have occurred because these males called at higher amplitudes than low-ranking males (see also Reby and McComb 2003).”
Song as an aggressive signal in songbirds (2009, background): “Again, a pattern of adaptive modulation within limits imposed by physical constraints is also found in other index signals (Wagner 1989; Bee et al. 1999; Reby & McComb 2003; Reby et al. 2005).”
Size Communication in domestic dog (Canis familiaris) growls. (2010, positive): “As body size is a determinant of resource-holding potential, fighting ability and reproductive success (Owings & Morton 1998), acoustic signals that provide an index of caller body size are potentially crucial (Fitch 2002; Reby & McComb 2003).”