Characterization And Interspecific And Biological Period Variation Of Deer Call

Acoustic communication,as a communication mode with the ability to spread information through long distance,fast transmission speed and highly freedom,plays an important role in social communication,mother-child interaction,anti-predator behavior and courtship during rutting period of deer family.Advances in digital recording technology and signal processing technology have promoted the formation of cross-fertilization between modern bioacoustics and ecology,environmental science,information science and other disciplines.Bioacoustics has great prospects for development and application,and there exists a demand for call samples from different biological periods of each species of deer family.The calls of sika deer(Cervus nippon),wapiti(Cervus canadensis),and red deer(Cervus elaphus)were studied in each biological period.The calls were collected from July to October2021 and October 2022 at Xiangyang Deer Farm,Jindi Deer Farm and Linsheng Deer Farm in Harbin,Heilongjiang Province,and Qianshan Presenting Deer Farm in Liaoyang City,Liaoning Province,respectively.Ltd.Lanjiazhen deer farm and Summit Temple deer farm in Liaoyang City,Liaoning Province,China.The sound spectrograms were exported by Praat(version 6.2.14,2022)after screening and cutting,and each call type was classified by structure through visual judgment,and the fundamental frequencies and formants of the calls were captured by Praat Script function,and then exported and grouped into IBM SPSS Statistics 25 for normality test and correlation analysis.The acoustic spectrograms of warning,mother-offspring communication and estrus calls were summarized for Sika deer(4 claves,8 hinds and 4 stags),Wapiti(3 claves,3 hinds and 7stags)and red deer(3 stags): sika deer calls had fewer formant and the most undulating waveforms,red deer calls had the smoothest waveforms and the lowest fundamental frequencies,and wapiti calls had both low frequencies,dense formant and undulating waveforms.The acoustic characteristics of wapiti have the characteristics of low frequency,dense formant,and undulating waveforms,so that individual species and call types can be distinguished by acoustic spectrogram characteristics.The acoustic parameters of each species were analyzed for intra-species and inter-species variability in fundamental frequency and formant:1.The intra-species significant differences were found in the fundamental frequency of mother-child communication calls between sika deer’s calves and hinds by Mann-Whitney U test(p = 0.015 < 0.05).The differences in the fundamental frequency(p = 0.342 > 0.05)and the formant(p = 0.943 > 0.05)between the hinds and the calves of wapiti were not significant by the T-test.The formant of hinds from sika deer and wapiti were significantly different from each other by Mann-Whitney U test(p < 0.05)and the formant of calves from sika deer and wapiti were significantly different from each other by t test(p < 0.05).The differences in the fundamental frequencies between,sika deer’s hinds and wapiti’s hinds,and,between,sika deer’s calves and wapiti’s calves,were not significant.2.The formants of the stags were highly significantly different from those of sika deer and wapiti(p < 0.05),and,sika deer and red deer(p < 0.05),and significantly different from those of wapiti and red deer(p = 0.015 < 0.05).