The Research On Discrimination Of Human's Emotional Expressions And Predator Vocalization By Giant Pandas

The Giant Pandas(Ailuropoda melanoleuca),as an endemic and endangered animals in C hina,is regarded as flagship species for global biodiversity conservation.By 2016,The captive breeding of giant pandas reached 471 and the captive population of giant pandas reached 176 in the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.In addition to their close interaction with keepers due to their daily care,nearly three million tourists visit the panda base to see the approximately one hundred and fifty giant pandas and ten new cubs at the facility each year.For captive-bred giant pandas,constant contact with humans is inevitable during pre-release training,which is essential for their survival in the wild.Thus,these giant pandas are exposed to the various expressions of a large number of visitors each day.Although many studies have investigated whether giant pandas can discriminate face-like shapes,little is known about their cognitive ability with respect to the emotional expressions of humans.It may be valuable to help daily care and management for giant pandas as well as the release of them into the wild.Predation is one of the relationships between giant pandas and its coexisting species,so we investigated the vigilant responses to predators to provide baseline information to understand the antipredator strategies of giant pandas.We tested whether adult giant pandas at the C he ngdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding can discriminate expressions from photographs of half of a face,which began in September 2015 and ended in February 2016.Then,to understand the pattern of vigilance behavior in giant pandas,predators voice exe mplars playback experiments were conducted between March 2010 and December 2011.We compared the proportion of scanning and locomotion time allocated on sex and playback stimuli.1.We found that pandas can learn to discriminate between angry and happy expressions based on not only partial information but also global information from the whole face.Young adult pandas(5-7 years old)learned to discriminate expressions more quickly than older individuals(8-16 years old),but no significant differences were found between females and males.These results suggest that young adult giant pandas are better at discriminating heterospecific emotions through discriminative cues.We found no evidence on giant pandas exhibit a right hemisphere(left visual field)advantage for the discriminating task.2.Our results showed that inherent differences in sex influence anti-predator behavior.Females scanned longer and with a higher frequency than males.it support the hypothesis that anti-predator behavior are governed by the ir reproductive status.Furthermore,male giant pandas can discriminate between predator vocalizations,different responses to leopards(Panthera pardus)and dholes(Cuon alpinus)calls suggests that they have an innate ability to identify certain predator s acoustically.