Female rhesus macaques discriminate unfamiliar paternal sisters in playback experiments: support for acoustic phenotype matching

Abstract

Widespread evidence exists that when relatives live together, kinship plays a central role in shaping the evolution of social behaviour. Previous studies showed that female rhesus macaques ( Macaca mulatta ) recognize familiar maternal kin using vocal cues. Recognizing paternal kin might, however, be more difficult as rhesus females mate promiscuously during the possible conception period, most probably concealing paternity. Behavioural observations indicate that semi free-ranging female rhesus macaques prefer to associate with their paternal half-sisters in comparison to unrelated females within the same group, particularly when born within the same age cohort. However, the cues and mechanism/s used in paternal kin discrimination remain under debate. Here, we investigated whether female rhesus macaques use the acoustic modality to discriminate between paternal half-sisters and non-kin, and tested familiarity and phenotype matching as the underlying mechanisms. We found that test females responded more often to calls of paternal half-sisters compared with calls of unrelated females, and that this discrimination ability was independent of the level of familiarity between callers and test females, which provides, to our knowledge, the first evidence for acoustic phenotype matching. Our study strengthens the evidence that female rhesus macaques can recognize their paternal kin, and that vocalizations are used as a cue.