Acoustic data in four species of macaques

We provide comparative data on vocal signals in adult females of four species of macaque : Tonkean macaques (Macaca tonkeana), crested macaques (M. nigra), Japanese macaques (M. fuscata), and rhesus macaques (M. mulatta).

We distinguished three social contexts: agonistic, affiliative and neutral. The agonistic context included aggression (supplantation, lunge, chase, slap, grab, bite, facial threat display) and response to aggression (aggression, avoidance, flight, crouch, submissive facial displays). The affiliative context included affiliative behaviours (approach, sitting in contact, social grooming, social play, grasp, embrace, mount, affiliative facial display). In the neutral context, the caller was not involved in a social interaction.

We drew spectrograms using the sofware Raven Pro v1.4’ (Cornell Lab of Ornithology, www.birds.cornell.edu/raven) with a 256 fast Fourier transform length and a Hanning window. With the same software, we measured the following variables: Durat...