Acoustic data of calls of Manx shearwater on Lundy Island

Vocalizations are widely used to signal behavioural intention in animal
communication, but may also carry additional information encoded in the
signal, in particular, vocalisations may carry acoustic signatures unique
to the calling individual. Manx shearwater (Puffinus puffinus) are
nocturnal seabirds that breed in dense colonies, where they must recognize
and locate mates among thousands of conspecifics calling in the dark.
There is evidence for individual vocal signatures in two shearwater
species, but quantitative data on the vocalisations of Manx
shearwater are lacking. We recorded calls of 13 Manx shearwaters on Lundy
Island, UK, by eliciting vocal responses to playback of conspecific calls.
We measured several spectral and temporal parameters of the calls, applied
linear discriminate analysis with leave-one-out cross-validation, and have
confirmed the individual vocal signatures. We then calculated
among-individual repeatability of 34 features describing the vocalization
to determine the extent to which these features may contribute to
individual signature coding. We found that calls cluster by individual in
both temporal and spectral characteristics, suggesting these are
contributing to Manx shearwaters’ unique call signatures.