Speaker
Description
The evolution of complex communication is thought to be shaped by the cognitive demands of social living, as proposed by the Social Complexity Hypothesis for Communicative Complexity (SCHCC). While supported in a few model taxa, its generalizability as a widespread selective pressure remains unclear. To address this, we examine an understudied, highly social species—the Rüppell's vulture—to explore how social interaction may drive communicative complexity in a non-model lineage.
We present the first systematic analysis of vocal communication in this species, using a soft clustering algorithm to quantify call structure. Our results reveal a surprisingly rich vocal repertoire, including calls linked to manipulating conspecific behavior, resolving conflict, mediating parent-offspring interactions, and other undetermined functions. Additionally, their submission calls exhibit a highly graded and combinatorial structure, which may offer an expanded vehicle to transfer individual and social information. This repertoire places Rüppell’s vultures in the upper quartile of avian vocal diversity, despite their historically presumed vocal simplicity.
By documenting complex vocal behavior in a taxon outside traditional avian models, our findings extend support for the SCHCC and establish vultures as a promising group for studying the evolutionary links between sociality, cognition, and communication. Our work contributes to a growing interdisciplinary effort—bridging behavioral biology, computational analysis, and cognition—to understand how physical and social interactions shape cognitive evolution.
This study not only broadens our knowledge of avian communication but also provides insights into the evolution of communication, highlighting the value of integrating diverse taxa and methods in cognitive research.
