Food-Offering Calls in Wild Golden Lion Tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia): Evidence for Teaching Behavior?

ABSTRACT: Many animals emit calls in the presence of food, but researchers do not always know the function of these calls. Evidence suggests that adult golden lion tamarins (Leontopithecus rosalia) use food-offering calls to teach juveniles which substrate (i.e., microhabitat) to forage on, or in, for food. However, we do not yet know whether juveniles learn from this aspect of the adults' behavior. Here we examine whether juveniles learn to associate food-offering calls with a foraging substrate, as a step toward assessing whether these calls qualify as teaching behavior. We compared the performance of four wild juvenile golden lion tamarins that were introduced to a novel substrate while exposed to playbacks of food-offering calls (experimental condition) to the performance of three juvenil

SUBMITTER: Troisi CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6300579 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature