In a vocal recognition study by Seyfarth and Cheney (1980), It was found that vervets recognize not only their own young from others, but can also distinguish whose mother the juveniles scream belongs to. Audio recordings of juvenile screams were played back to free range vervets and other females. It was found:*Screams of free-ranging juvenile vervet monkeys were played to a group containing their mothers and two ‘control’ females
*Mothers' responses showed significantly shorter latency and longer duration than controls
*Playbacks significantly increased the probability that controls would look at the mother
this article can be found on ScienceDirect and GoogleScholar, entitled: Vocal Recognition in free-ranging vervet monkeys. It was published in Animal Behavior in 1980.
Posted by
-Gina Fortunato
That study is definitely an interesting one! Are there any new developments in the study of vervet monkey communication, since your study was preformed in the 80's? I know there was a study also done with different calls that signify different predators- which is also very interesting.
ReplyDeletePosted by Christine Rega
This is really interesting. Did the study mention how the control females acted towards the screaming baby monkey? Did they ignore it completely? It would be neat if they knew whose baby it was and could go find its mother and inform her that her baby was screaming.
ReplyDeleteSara Ku
This is a surprising article- that the cries of a baby monkey is specific to the mother. Are the cries a learned behavior? I wonder what accounts for the variation in the cries between the different young in the species? Was there any communication or action preformed between the mother of the screaming young and the other control vervet monkeys? If the mother wasn't present is it likely that the control monkeys would interact with the screaming juvenile monkey?
ReplyDeletePosted by Tiffany Mallet
This is very interesting. Was there any mention of how old the babies were when they were screaming? I'm wondering if there is a correlation between age of the babies and when the mothers start ignoring their screams, if at all. In short, do mothers respond to their offspring's screams even if the offspring is an adult?
ReplyDeletePosted by Bethany Rappleyea