Highlights•Vocalizations play an important role in managing group cohesion.•We
investigated how meerkats' close call acoustic structure varies with context.•Close call …

Group coordination, when 'on the move'or when visibility is low, is a challenge faced by
many social living animals. While some animals manage to maintain cohesion solely …

During group movements, many socially living and group-foraging animals produce contact
calls. Contact calls typically function to coordinate and maintain cohesion among group …

A great deal of variation is known to underlie the vocalizations of animals. Calls can for
example vary between individuals or between social and behavioural contexts. Calls also …

Animal vocal communication research traditionally focuses on acoustic and contextual
features of calls, yet substantial information is also contained in response selectivity and …

It is well established that animal vocalizations can encode information regarding a sender's
identity, sex, age, body size, social rank and group membership. However, the association …

In animals, signaling behavior is often context-dependent, with variation in the probability of
emitting certain signals dependent on fitness advantages. Senders may adjust signaling rate …

Flexible vocal production has been demonstrated in several vertebrate species, with much
work focusing on the role of the social “audience” in explaining variation in call production. It …

Repertoire size, frequently determined by the number of discrete call types, has been used
to assess vocal complexity in animals. However, species can also increase their …

Individual discrimination is an important element in the evolution of social behaviour and is
particularly important in social living species which show intense intragroup interactions …