Meeting Abstract
Many animals rely on the acoustical environment for functions spanning mate attraction, navigation and predator and prey detection. Research suggests that environmental acoustics can greatly influence the propagation and reception of biologically relevant sounds, potentially interfering with the ability of animals to interact with their environment. We sought to determine whether natural sounds influence vigilance and predator detection in the California ground squirrel (Otospermophilus beecheyi). In a manipulative field experiment, vigilance and foraging behavior was recorded under three conditions: a playback of river rapids noise, a playback of cicada chorus noise and a silent control playback. Additionally, within each treatment, we measured flight initiation distances (FID), defined as the distance at which an animal flees from an approaching threat. We measured the squirrels’ FIDs using the approach of a robotic coyote, thereby simulating a common predator in our study area. We found that squirrels were more vigilant during river rapid playback relative to control and cicada chorus treatments. We found mixed results regarding the influence of sound treatments on foraging rates and no difference in FIDs among the three treatments. To our knowledge, our results are the first to demonstrate that natural sounds can influence vigilance. Our results also support recent studies demonstrating increased vigilance in the presence of low-frequency background noise due to traffic or wind farms. Whether natural sounds influence other key behaviors is ripe for future studies.
