Unsupervised discovery of family specific vocal usage in the Mongolian gerbil

Abstract

AbstractMany animal species use vocalizations to communicate social information and previous experiments in rodents have identified a range of vocal types that may be used for this purpose. However, social vocalizations are typically acquired during brief interactions between animals with no prior social relationship, and under environmental conditions with limited ethological relevance. Here, we establish long-term acoustic recordings from Mongolian gerbil families, a core social group that uses an array of sonic and ultrasonic vocalizations which vary with social context. Three separate gerbil families (two parents and four pups) were transferred to an enlarged environment and continuous 20-day audio recordings were obtained. We leveraged deep-learning based unsupervised analysis of 583,237 vocalizations to show that gerbils exhibit a more complex vocal repertoire than has been previously reported. Furthermore, gerbils displayed family-specific vocal repertoires, including differences in vocal type usage and transitions. Since gerbils live naturally as extended families in complex underground burrows that are adjacent to other families, these results suggest the presence of a vocal dialect which could be exploited by animals to represent kinship.These findings offer insight into the naturalistic vocal tendencies of gerbil families and position the Mongolian gerbil as a compelling animal to study the neural basis of vocal communication.