The irrelevance of individual discrimination in meerkat alarm calls

Abstract

Individual discrimination is an important element in the evolution of social behaviour and is particularly important in social living species which show intense intragroup interactions. Numerous previous studies, particularly with nonhuman primates, ground squirrels and marmots, demonstrate the widespread ability of various species to signal and perceive individual identity from vocalizations. The function of individually different alarm calls is thought to assist in the detection of unreliable individuals. This would allow individuals to optimize the benefits of antipredator behaviour by self-assessing the relative predation risk, and responding selectively to reliable callers. In this study we investigated whether meerkats, Suricata suricatta, a social mongoose, discriminated among alarm callers individually, and adjusted their response accordingly. Several parameters of the acoustic structure of meerkat alarm calls were measured and analysed with multivariate statistics. Within groups, the 10-fold cross-validation of a multinomial regression yielded, on average, 90% correct assignment. This strongly suggests that meerkats have individually distinct alarm calls. With a habituation–dishabituation playback experiment, we then tested whether meerkats use this information to discriminate between individual callers. Receivers did not distinguish between different individuals in the playback experiments. In meerkats, unreliable callers appear to be uncommon, and the cost of being predated might exceed the costs of responding to an unreliable caller, thus rendering a reliability-based discrimination mechanism unnecessary. Although meerkat alarm calls contain information on individual identity, this information does not appear to be important to the receivers in this context.