@article {50503,
	title = {Functionally referential alarm calls in noisy miners communicate about predator behaviour},
	journal = {Animal Behaviour},
	volume = {129},
	year = {2017},
	month = {Jan-07-2017},
	pages = {171 - 179},
	abstract = {<p>Many vertebrates have alarm calls that warn conspecifics about danger, and some species even communicate about the type of predator or its behaviour, allowing for appropriate responses. However, such \&lsquo;functionally referential\&rsquo; communication has been shown experimentally in only a handful of species, and requires demonstrating that individuals give acoustically distinct calls to different threats, and that the calls alone are sufficient to prompt listeners to behave as if a specific threat is present. We carried out model presentations, acoustic analyses and a playback experiment to test whether the alarm calls of noisy miners, Manorina melanocephala, are functionally referential. Miners gave different calls to airborne raptor models compared to terrestrial or perched raptor models, and even switched from \&lsquo;aerial\&rsquo; alarm calls to \&lsquo;chur\&rsquo; alarm calls when a hawk glider landed on the ground. They also behaved differently to these two types of threats, showing avoidance to aerial threats, including fleeing or freezing, but deterrent behaviour to terrestrial threats, including vigilance, approach and mobbing. The two alarm call types were acoustically distinct, and consistent with calls to live predators. Blind scoring of video revealed that birds responded appropriately to playbacks of alarm calls alone, typically fleeing to aerial alarm calls yet becoming vigilant, approaching and calling to chur calls. Noisy miners produce alarm calls that therefore meet both criteria for functional reference, and thus become one of the few bird species in which such calls have been confirmed. Many birds appear to give different calls to airborne predators compared to during mobbing of terrestrial or stationary predators, so functionally referential alarms are likely to be common and may often categorize predators by their behaviour and not simply their taxonomic type.</p>
},
	keywords = {acoustic communication, alarm calls, antipredator behaviour, functional reference, mobbing calls},
	issn = {00033472},
	doi = {10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.05.021},
	url = {http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0003347217301586},
	author = {Cunningham, Sean and Magrath, Robert D.}
}
@article {50485,
	title = {Feeling anxious? The mechanisms of vocal deception in tufted capuchin monkeys},
	journal = {Animal Behaviour},
	volume = {130},
	year = {2017},
	month = {Jan-08-2017},
	pages = {37 - 46},
	abstract = {<p>An ability to deceive conspeci fi cs is thought to have favoured the evolution of large brains in social animals, but evidence that such behaviours require cognitive complexity is lacking. Tufted capuchin monkeys ( Sapajus spp.) have been documented to use false alarm calls during feeding in a manner that functions to deceive competitors. However, comparative evidence suggests that the production of vo- calizations by nonhuman primates is largely underpinned by emotional mechanisms, calling into question more cognitive interpretations of this behaviour. To determine whether emotional states are plausibly necessary and suf fi cient to proximately explain deceptive alarm call production, we examined the association between self-directed behaviours (SDBs), as a proxy for anxiety, and the production of spontaneous false alarm calls among tufted capuchins. Speci fi cally, we predicted that if anxiety is necessary for the production of false alarms, then individuals that produce spontaneous false alarms should exhibit more SDBs in those contexts in which they call. If anxiety is also suf fi cient to explain the false alarm call production, then we predicted that individuals that call more in a given context would show higher rates of SDBs in that context, and that high rates of calling would be temporally associated with high rates of SDBs. Our results support the contention that states of anxiety are necessary for an individual to spontaneously produce false alarms, but that such states are not suf fi cient to explain patterns of calling. The link between anxiety and deceptive calling thus appears complex, and cognitively based decision-making processes may play some role in call production.</p>
},
	keywords = {affect, alarm calls, anxiety, deceptive behaviour, emotions, primates, scratching, self-directed behaviours, vocalizations, within-group contest competition},
	issn = {00033472},
	doi = {10.1016/j.anbehav.2017.06.008},
	url = {http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0003347217301835},
	author = {Kean, Donna and Tiddi, Barbara and Fahy, Martin and Heistermann, Michael and Schino, Gabriele and Wheeler, Brandon C.}
}
