Vocal characteristics of distress and reproductive vocalizations in North American wapiti

Variation in the vocal behavior of nonhuman vertebrates includes graded transitions and more dramatic changes. Wapiti males produce a reproductive bugle that has a fundamental frequency that surpasses 2,000 Hz with evidence of biphonation and other nonlinear phenomena. Here, we analyse the acoustic structure of captive wapiti vocalizations to compare the male bugle with three categories of distress vocalizations: neonate distress (capture) calls, calf isolation calls, and adult female isolation calls. These four high-arousal call categories serve a common general function in recruiting conspecifics but occur in different behavioural contexts (capture, isolation, reproduction). Our goal was to distinguish characteristics that vary in graded steps that may correspond to an animal’s age or size from characteristics that are unique to the bugle. Characteristics of the high and loud fundamental (G0) varied in an age/size-graded manner with a decrease in minimum G0, an increase in the maximum..., , , # Data from: Vocal characteristics of distress and reproductive vocalizations in North American wapiti

**Corresponding author**: Susan Lingle: Department of Biology, University of Winnipeg, Winnipeg, MB. Email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

This README file describes data for two files.

The first file, “Wapiti_Raw Data.xlsx”, includes raw data used to calculate means, standard deviations, and statistical results for a mixed model ANOVA.

The second file, “Averaged Data.xlsx”, includes data that were averaged for each individual before calculating the proportion of calls with each form of non-linear phenomena and running Kruskal-Wallis tests on non-linear phenomena. This data file was also used to conduct a Principal Component Analysis using the non-linear phenomena and a Descriptive Discriminant Analysis (DDA) using the averaged acoustic data for each individual.

**FILENAME 1: Wapiti_Raw Data.xlsx**

This Excel file has raw acoustic data for the wapiti, plus a fe...