Abstract
Recognition of information from acoustic signals is crucial in many animals, and individuals are under selection pressure to discriminate between the signals of conspecifics and heterospecifics or males and females. Here, we first report that rhinos use information encoded in their calls to assess conspecifics and individuals of closely related species. The southern (Ceratotherium simum) and critically endangered northern (C. cottoni) white rhinos are the most social out of all the rhinoceros species and use a contact call pant. We found that southern white rhino pant calls provide reliable information about the caller’s sex, age class and social situation. Playback experiments on wild territorial southern white rhinoceros males revealed that they responded more strongly to the pant calls of conspecific females compared to the calls of other territorial males. This suggests that pant calls are more important form of communication between males and females than between territorial males. Territorial southern males also discriminated between female and territorial male calls of northern species and reacted more intensively to the calls of northern than southern males. This might be caused by a novelty effect since both species naturally live in allopatry. We conclude that white rhinos can directly benefit from assessing individuals at long distances using vocal cues especially because their eyesight is poor. Pant calls thus likely play a significant role in their social relationships and spatial organization. In addition, better understanding of vocal communication in white rhinos might be helpful in conservation management particularly because of their low reproduction in captivity.
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Acknowledgments
We are very thankful to the management and owners of all the wildlife reserves and zoos for kindly allowing IC to conduct field work there. We very much appreciate approval of this project, logistical help and support from the following people from the wildlife reserves: Jonathan Swart, Gerhardt Lorist, André Burger, Shaun McCartney, Anton Walker, Anthony Roberts, Hermann Müller, Elias Mangwane, Lucky Phiri, Louis Loock, Annelize Steyn, Johan Eksteen, Thomas Sikhwivhilu, Thompson Phakalane, Khanyisile Mbatha, and from the zoos: Jochen Lengger, Jiří Hrubý, Ivo Klika, Anton Freivolt, Markéta Horská and Martin Krug. We are very grateful to Vítězslav Bičík, Stanislav Bureš and Norman Owen-Smith for their support of this study and to the rhino keepers in the zoos for their kind assistance. The construction of the speaker by the late Pavel Krchňák and by Martin Deutschl is very much appreciated. IC would also like to express thanks to the wildlife reserves and zoo Dvůr Králové for providing accommodation. Nicolas Mathevon and three anonymous reviewers provided valuable comments, which helped improve the manuscript.
Funding
This research was supported by the Internal Grant Agency of the Palacký University in Olomouc PRF 2015-018 and by the mobility grants from the Palacký University to IC.
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Playback experiments and recording of calls for this study were approved by the Ethics and Scientific Committee of the National Zoological Gardens of South Africa (Project P11/03) and adhered to the “Guidelines for the treatment of animals in behavioural research and teaching” as published by the ASAB (2012). The project complies with the current laws of South Africa and the Czech Republic.
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Cinková, I., Policht, R. Sex and species recognition by wild male southern white rhinoceros using contact pant calls. Anim Cogn 19, 375–386 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0940-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0940-7