0000000000373903
AUTHOR
Bilal Habib
Measuring acoustic complexity in continuously varying signals: how complex is a wolf howl?
Communicative complexity is a key behavioural and ecological indicator in the study of animal cognition. Much attention has been given to measures such as repertoire size and syntactic structure in both bird and mammal vocalizations, as large repertoires and complex call combinations may give an indication of the cognitive abilities both of the sender and receiver. However, many animals communicate using a continuous vocal signal that does not easily lend itself to be described by concepts such as ‘repertoire’. For example, dolphin whistles and wolf howls both have complex patterns of frequency modulation, so that no two howls or whistles are quite the same. Is there a sense in which some o…
Disentangling canid howls across multiple species and subspecies: Structure in a complex communication channel
Wolves, coyotes, and other canids are members of a diverse genus of top predators of considerable conservation and management interest. Canid howls are long-range communication signals, used both for territorial defence and group cohesion. Previous studies have shown that howls can encode individual and group identity. However, no comprehensive study has investigated the nature of variation in canid howls across the wide range of species. We analysed a database of over 2000 howls recorded from 13 different canid species and subspecies. We applied a quantitative similarity measure to compare the modulation pattern in howls from different populations, and then applied an unsupervised clusteri…
Howl variation across Himalayan, North African, Indian, and Holarctic wolf clades: tracing divergence in the world’s oldest wolf lineages using acoustics
Abstract Vocal divergence within species often corresponds to morphological, environmental, and genetic differences between populations. Wolf howls are long-range signals that encode individual, group, and subspecies differences, yet the factors that may drive this variation are poorly understood. Furthermore, the taxonomic division within the Canis genus remains contended and additional data are required to clarify the position of the Himalayan, North African, and Indian wolves within Canis lupus. We recorded 451 howls from the 3 most basal wolf lineages—Himalayan C. lupus chanco—Himalayan haplotype, North African C. lupus lupaster, and Indian C. lupus pallipes wolves—and present a howl ac…
Mesopredator spatial and temporal response to large-predators and anthropogenic activities in a Central Indian Reserve
The survival and long-term persistence of mammalian carnivores is a key conservation challenge in developing countries like India. Many species of carnivores are forced to inhabit unprotected human-dominated landscapes given the miniscule proportion of land designated to protected areas. Differential human activity across a landscape grossly influences the activity patterns of both predator and prey species, depending on their degree of specialisation in feeding habits and habitat use. There lies a dearth of studies addressing the spatio-temporal dynamics of large and meso-predators in such disturbed landscapes. We conducted camera trap studies in dry deciduous forests of Tadoba-Andhari Tig…