Vocal Communication and Reproduction in Deer

By D. Reby, K. McComb. 2003

102 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Publisher Summary Despite their reputation for being elusive, deer are in fact highly vocal animals. The study of vocal communication and reproduction in deer has revealed that males produce an unusually diverse array of rutting vocalizations, with extreme variation occurring both between and within species. Conspicuous calls are found in both sexes of all studied species. Deer vocalizations are also notable for their diversity, ranging from dog-like alarm barks to high-pitched, whistle-like mating bugles. The deer species are classified into two broad categories based on the nature of their mating systems that include small, solitary species; and large, gregarious, and polygynous species. The reproductive calls in solitary deer are the mating calls or barking and territoriality; whereas, the reproductive calls in gregarious deer are to compete intensely for females. The chapter also describes the research in progress and future aspects in this area. In deer, the ability of vocal communication appears to have arisen through sexual selection—males lower their larynges to display their vocal tract length and thus their body size to a maximal extent—suggesting that similar selection pressures may have influenced the descent of the larynx in humans.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/213610c99e8e98fa24ff5e94c7f801fe41e92129

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Citations in the corpus

Individual Acoustic Variation in Fallow Deer (Dama dama) Common and Harsh Groans: A Source-Filter Theory Perspective (2007, background): “A previous study showed that fallow deer common groans contain information on individuality (Reby et al. 1998), but the factors responsible for inter-individual acoustic variation have not been explored in detail and the relative importance of different call features for achieving individuality…”
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).”
Retraction of the mobile descended larynx during groaning enables fallow bucks (Dama dama) to lower their formant frequencies (2006, result): “This was also noted in an earlier review by Reby & McComb (2003b) .”
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).”