Responses to context- and individual-specific cues in cotton-top tamarin long calls

We identified two variants of cotton-top tamarin long calls that occur in different situations: communication between troops and intratroop calling. A discriminant analysis differentiated between the forms of the two variants with a classification accuracy of 98%. Discriminant analyses and analyses of variance also differentiated between the call structures of individual animals for each type of long call. A playback experiment elicited alerting, arousal and aggressive responses only to the calls of nontroop members. Aggressive behaviour patterns were elicited by the intertroop long call variant (Normal Long Call) and not by the within troop variant (Quiet Long Call). The long call variants are perceived as different by the monkeys and elicit functionally different responses. Several parallels exist between the long calls of tamarins and the song of birds.