Vocalization in a neonatal Amur tiger cub.

Abstract

Although the acoustical features of a small number of calls representing the vocal repertoire of adult tigers have been studied and reported, calls produced by developing tigers representing any subspecies have not been described. In that light, the acoustical features of calls produced by an Amur cub during the first two postnatal weeks of life will be considered. The vocal repertoire of the cub observed during recording sessions was limited, consisting primarily of neonatal cries composed of three distinct types: an intense, harmonically rich phonation, an aperiodic cry (dysphonation), and a compound cry exhibiting both dysphonation and harmonically rich phonation segments. Overall acoustic power of the harmonically rich phonation was uniformly distributed across a frequency band ranging from approximately 0.6–2.0 kHz and that was centered on roughly 1.2 kHz on the second postnatal day. While the same basic pattern was observed on postnatal day 13, inter-harmonic differences were smaller, and between days 2 and 13 the mean fundamental frequency dropped from ∼260 to ∼200 Hz; typically, f0 varied during each utterance at each age studied. These findings will be considered in relation to the spectrographic character of calls produced by adult Amur tigers. [Funding was provided by NSF Grant 0823417.]