Unsupervised discovery of family specific vocal usage in the Mongolian gerbil.

ABSTRACT: In nature, animal vocalizations can provide crucial information about identity, including kinship and hierarchy. However, lab-based vocal behavior is typically studied during brief interactions between animals with no prior social relationship, and under environmental conditions with limited ethological relevance. Here, we address this gap by establishing long-term acoustic recordings from Mongolian gerbil families, a core social group that uses an array of sonic and ultrasonic vocalizations. Three separate gerbil families were transferred to an enlarged environment and continuous 20-day audio recordings were obtained. Using a variational autoencoder (VAE) to quantify 583,237 vocalizations, we show that gerbils exhibit a more elaborate vocal repertoire than has been previously reported and

SUBMITTER: Peterson RE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11398318 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature