We all know that monkeys communicate through the different sounds that they make or even by the things that they may do. Interestingly, in Amboseli National Park, which is located in Kenya, researchers studied Spreo superbus and vervet monkeys. It was quickly discovered that these monkeys give acoustically different alarm calls to different classes of predators. The monkey’s forms of communication are called raptor alarms because they are given exclusively to their flying species that attack from the air. While vervet monkeys give a sort of what the researchers liked to call “leopard alarms” to represent their terrestrial predators, starling monkeys give terrestrial predator alarms to a wide variety of species that includes some birds.
There were many habituation experiments demonstrated by Cheney & Seyfarth that monkeys compare vocalizations that are surrounding them such as vervets who have learned to ignore playback of a starling’s raptor alarms after also learning to ignore playback of a vervet’s eagle alarm. There were also experiments that demonstrated that vervets are sensitive to the breadth of referential specificity exhibited by different calls. Subjects who learned to ignore playback of a starling terrestrial predator alarm call also learned to ignore the playback of both vervet monkey’s leopard and vervet raptor alarms.
The results of this experiment were that vervets respond to more of the frequencies of the alarm calls, while starlings respond more to what the alarm call is. The implications of this experiment were that these animals couldn’t have responded for varies reason and not just what they believed their reactions were. This experiment does have broader impacts because these results could explain how they communicate in the wild and what these alarm calls actually mean or what they could mean. This information is so important because it gives us the insight of how monkeys actually escape their predators and what the noises they make mean for us and for them.
Reference:
Seyfarth, R., & Cheney, D. (1990). The assessment by vervet monkeys of their own and another species’ alarm calls. The Assessment by Vervet Monkeys of Their Own and Another Species’ Alarm Calls, 754-764. doi:10.3897/bdj.1.e1005.figure2f
