Current Biology
Volume 23, Issue 17, 9 September 2013, Pages 1677-1680
Journal home page for Current Biology

Report
Wolf Howling Is Mediated by Relationship Quality Rather Than Underlying Emotional Stress

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2013.06.066Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Highlights

  • We investigated the influence of social and physiological factors on wolf howling

  • Wolves howl more to keep contact with affiliated partners and with pack leaders

  • Howling is mediated by the social relationship not cortisol level of the howlers

  • This pattern indicates that wolves have some voluntary control of their howling

Summary

While considerable research has addressed the function of animal vocalizations, the proximate mechanisms driving call production remain surprisingly unclear. Vocalizations may be driven by emotions and the physiological state evoked by changes in the social-ecological environment [1, 2], or animals may have more control over their vocalizations, using them in flexible ways mediated by the animal’s understanding of its surrounding social world [3, 4]. While both explanations are plausible and neither excludes the other, to date no study has attempted to experimentally investigate the influence of both emotional and cognitive factors on animal vocal usage. We aimed to disentangle the relative contribution of both mechanisms by examining howling in captive wolves. Using a separation experiment and by measuring cortisol levels, we specifically investigated whether howling is a physiological stress response to group fragmentation [5] and whether it is driven by social factors, particularly relationship quality [6, 7]. Results showed that relationship quality between the howler and the leaving individual better predicted howling than did the current physiological state. Our findings shed important light on the degree to which animal vocal production can be considered as voluntary.

Cited by (0)

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

5

These authors contributed equally to this work