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Siberian crane duet as an individual signature of a pair: comparison of visual and statistical classification techniques

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Abstract

Vocal individuality varies between species and/or ontogenesis stages depending on needs in the vocal recognition, but also estimation of individual differences depends on the method of analysis. We studied pair-specific differences of duets elicited by mating pairs of Siberian crane Grus leucogeranus. We quantitatively described the duet structure and compared visual and statistical classification methods of pair identification by duet. Three methods were used: discriminant analysis, method of classification trees and visual classification of spectrogram. We found significant interpair differences. The pairs differ by duet structure that is by the ratio of male- and female-initiated duets and by the ratio of the number of male to female calls; temporal-frequency duet characteristics are pair-specific, too. All methods showed high interpair differences, which exceeded random values significantly. Discriminant analysis stepwise procedure based on 11 parameters resulted in 97.3% of correctly assigned duets. Human observers correctly assigned 80.7% of spectrograms. Our data provide a basis for remote monitoring of this endangered species with a wild population of only 3,000 birds.

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Acknowledgments

We thank I. A. Volodin for his huge help with data processing. We thank the staff of the Oka Crane Breeding Centre of the Oka Biosphere State Nature Reserve, especially T.A. Kashentseva, K.A. Postelnykh, T.V. Postelnykh, and E.V. Antonyuk for providing the possibility for research and for their all around help during data gathering. We appreciated A.V. Klenova for her help with the duet recording. N.S. Chernetsov and A.V. Klenova made helpful comments. We thank M. and D. Banin for improvement of English. We thank anonymous reviewers for useful advice and comments on earlier versions of the mansucript. During our work, we adhere to the “Guidelines for the treatment of animals in behavioral research and teaching” (Anim. Behav. 65: 249–255) and the laws of the Russian Federation where the research was conducted. This study was supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant 07-04-00609).

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  1. Department of Vertebrate Zoology, Faculty of Biology, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Vorobievy Gory, Moscow, 119992, Russia

    Eugenia V. Bragina & Irina R. Beme

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  1. Eugenia V. Bragina
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  2. Irina R. Beme
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Correspondence to Eugenia V. Bragina.

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Communicated by Peter McGregor

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Bragina, E.V., Beme, I.R. Siberian crane duet as an individual signature of a pair: comparison of visual and statistical classification techniques. acta ethol 13, 39–48 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-010-0073-6

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