Acoustic Coding of Information in a Complex Social Network: Identity Signaling in Northern Elephant Seals

Abstract

The process of learning plays a pivotal role when an animal must correctly identify individuals within a dynamic social group. In male–male competition for access to reproductive success, a male’s ability to learn the calls that are associated with one’s rival can help to maintain structured dominance relationships and reduce the costs associated with fighting. Male northern elephant seals operate in one of the most competitive breeding systems among mammals, and selection pressures for accurate rival assessment are extreme. Through a long-term field effort that has tracked individual males over multiple breeding seasons, we have found that male elephant seals are operating in a large, spatially dynamic social network, which is conducive to the emergence of individual acoustic recognition and associative learning. Given their accessibility during the breeding season, the northern elephant seal provides an excellent comparative framework for studies of the relationship between signal function and an individual’s social environment.