News & Views
Published: 21 March 2022
ANIMAL COMMUNICATION

Social orangutans have varied vocal personalities
Ammie K. Kalan
Nature Ecology & Evolution (2022)Cite this article

Taking advantage of natural variation present in six populations of wild orangutans, a new study correlates population density with multiple facets of individuals’ vocal phenotype and demonstrates that sociality influences vocal plasticity in great apes.

In the past twenty years or so there has been an accumulation of evidence from both experimental and observational research for language-like cognition in monkeys and apes, demonstrating substantial continuity between primate vocal communication and human language1,2. However, evidence for vocal learning (generally considered as being whether individuals can acquire new sounds) and vocal plasticity (the ability to modify existing sounds in response to auditory experience and social input over time, sometimes persisting into adulthood3) in primates remains rare1,3, and where it does exist comes mainly from captive populations. Now, writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Lameira and colleagues4 provide the first explicit test of social influences on vocal plasticity in great apes in the wild.