DISSERTATION RESEARCH: Playback Experiments to Examine Contextual Usage of Shared Whistles by Allied Male Bottlenose Dolphins, Tursiops Truncatus

回放实验展示了雄性宽吻海豚（trunsiops truncatus）共同鸣笛的语境用法。Peter L. Tyack和Stephanie L. watwoodwoods Hole海洋研究所生物系。伍兹霍尔MA 02543。海豚和鲸鱼（生物学家称之为鲸目动物）是少数几种表现出高度发达的声音学习能力的哺乳动物之一。海豚不仅在婴儿时期学会了发出独特的标志性哨声，而且成年后也保留了模仿声音的能力。人们对鸟类和人类在社会纽带形成过程中声音匹配的作用越来越感兴趣，海豚为研究这种独立进化出声音学习能力的哺乳动物提供了机会（Tyack 2000）。鸣叫模仿主要用于具有密切社会关系的个体之间或领土竞争对手之间。大多数证据表明，海豚匹配叫声要么是为了发起与另一个个体的互动，要么是作为群体成员的“徽章”。当海豚互动时，它们可能会模仿与它们有密切联系的动物的独特哨声。Smolker和Pepper（1999）描述了在社会交往中形成紧密联盟的雄性海豚中的哨子趋同，这表明哨子共享对具有亲密关系的个体很重要。本研究旨在研究雄性宽吻海豚在自然发生的繁殖环境或其他社会环境中使用趋同或模仿的口哨声。回放实验将测试结盟的雄性宽吻海豚是使用共同的口哨声来吸引潜在的雌性海豚，还是保护雌性海豚免受非联盟雄性海豚的竞争。直到最近，研究自由放养动物的个体声音反应一直很困难。这项研究使用了一个小型的拖曳线性阵列，可以确定水柱中声音产生的方向，从而可以识别单个信号发出者（Tyack和Miller 1998）。这项研究将在佛罗里达州的萨拉索塔湾进行，那里的一个海豚群落已经被研究了30年。回放刺激将从过去15年中在临时捕获-释放事件中记录的各种年龄-性别类别的高质量录音中产生。对这些录音的分析表明，联盟伙伴之间的口哨声高度相似。该提案利用声学定位的最新发展，从自由放养的、社会交往的宽吻海豚中获得识别的口哨声。焦点行为采样、声音定位和重放实验相结合，为理解模仿在社会交际中的作用提供了新的途径。回放实验在破译鸟类和灵长类动物特定发声的使用方面是无价的。拟议的研究提供了一个机会，可以在更精细的尺度上研究鲸类动物的声音社会行为，而不是之前对自由放养的动物进行的研究。这项研究的结果将与陆生物种的类似研究更具可比性。

PLAYBACK EXPERIMENTS TO DEMONSTRATE CONTEXTUAL USAGE OF SHARED WHISTLES BY ALLIED MALE BOTTLENOSE DOLPHINS, TURSIOPS TRUNCATUS. Peter L. Tyack and Stephanie L. WatwoodBiology Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Woods Hole MA 02543.Dolphins and whales (known to biologists as the cetaceans) constitute one of the few mammal groups that demonstrate highly developed vocal learning abilities. Dolphins not only learn to produce an individually distinctive signature whistle as infants, but adults retain the ability to imitate sounds. There has been growing interest in the role of vocal matching during the formation of social bonds in birds and humans, and dolphins provide an opportunity for studying this issue in a mammal that independently evolved abilities of vocal learning (Tyack 2000). Call imitation is used in bird species primarily between individuals with close social relationships or between territorial competitors. Most evidence suggests dolphins match calls either to initiate an interaction with another individual, or as a "badge" of group membership. When dolphins are interacting, they may imitate the individually distinctive whistle of an animal with whom they share a strong bond. Smolker and Pepper (1999) described whistle convergence in socially interacting male dolphins which formed a close-knit alliance, suggesting that whistle sharing is important for individuals with close relationships. This study proposes to examine the use of convergent or imitated whistles by allied male bottlenose dolphins in naturally occurring reproductive contexts or other social contexts. Playback experiments will test whether allied male bottlenose dolphins use shared whistles to attract potentially receptive females or to guard females from competitor non-alliance males. It has been difficult to study the individual vocal responses of free-ranging animals until recently. This study uses a small, towed linear array that can determine the direction from which sounds are produced in the water column, allowing for the identification of individual signalers (Tyack and Miller 1998). The research will be carried out in Sarasota Bay, Florida, where a community of individually identifiable dolphins has been studied for 30 years. Playback stimuli will be generated from high-quality recordings from a variety of age-sex classes recorded during temporary capture-release events during the last 15 years. Analyses of these recordings for alliance males demonstrated a high degree of similarity between the whistles of alliance partners. This proposal makes use of recent developments in acoustic localization to obtain identified whistles from free-ranging, socially interacting bottlenose dolphins. The combination of focal behavioral sampling, acoustic localization, and playback experiments presents a new way to understand the role of imitation in social communication. Playback experiments have been invaluable in deciphering the use of specific vocalizations in birds and primates. The proposed research presents an opportunity to examine acoustic social behavior in cetaceans on a much finer scale than previously attempted with free-ranging animals. The results from this study will be much more comparable to similar studies in terrestrial species.