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Vocal Communication in Corvids: Who Emits, What Information and Benefits?

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Acoustic Communication in Animals

Abstract

Corvids live in complex societies in which individuals form dominance hierarchies and affiliative relationships. Such complex individual-based social lives are thought to drive the flexible social skills involved in the audio-vocal communication among corvids. Recent studies suggest the flexibility of audio-vocal communication in corvids, such as cross-modal audio-visual individual recognition, food-associated referential signaling, and volitional vocal control associated with arbitrary visual stimuli. Corvids are also kleptoparasitic foragers that scrounge food resources produced by heterospecific predatory animals, such as wolves and humans. Such foraging ecology is assumed to be the foundation for corvid cognition and behavior that are sensitive to the behavior of heterospecific animals. In this chapter, we review the audio-vocal communication among corvids, especially contact calls and alarm calls, and its cognitive underpinning from the viewpoints of social and foraging ecologies.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Keio University, Tokyo, Japan

    Yuiko Suzuki & Ei-Ichi Izawa

Authors
  1. Yuiko Suzuki
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  2. Ei-Ichi Izawa
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Correspondence to Ei-Ichi Izawa .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Aichi University, Toyohashi, Japan

    Yoshimasa Seki

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Suzuki, Y., Izawa, EI. (2023). Vocal Communication in Corvids: Who Emits, What Information and Benefits?. In: Seki, Y. (eds) Acoustic Communication in Animals. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0831-8_7

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