The songs of the indris (Mammalia: Primates: Indridae): contextual variation in the long-distance calls of a lemur

Abstract

Contextual variation in the loud calls of strepsirhine primates is poorly understood. To understand whether songs given by indris in different contexts represent acoustically distinct variants and have the potential to elicit context-specific behaviours in conspecific listeners, we investigated the acoustic variability of these songs and the distance travelled by vocalizers after their emissions. Songs of 41 individuals were recorded from 16 indri groups in four different forest sites in eastern Madagascar. We collected a total of 270 duets and choruses arising during territorial defence, advertisement and cohesion. We demonstrated that the structure of indri songs conveyed context-specific information through their overall duration, but shared the sequential pattern of harsh units (roars) followed by long notes and, finally, descending phrases. Analysing in detail individual contributions to advertisement songs and cohesion songs, we found that the acoustic structure of units could be classified correctly with a high degree of reliability (96.23% of long notes, 80.16% of the descending phrases, 72.54% of roars). Future investigations using playback stimuli could explore the relationship between acoustic features and the information transmitted by the song.