Vocalizations carry emotional, physiological and individual information. This suggests that
they may serve as potentially useful indicators for inferring animal welfare. At the same time …

Information compression is a general principle of human language: the most frequent words
are shorter in length (Zipf's Law of Brevity) and the duration of constituents decreases as the …

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) allows for the study of vocal animals on temporal and
spatial scales difficult to achieve using only human observers. Recent improvements in …

Highlights•Little auks are very colonial seabirds with strong partner and nest fidelity.•We
investigated identity coding in vocalizations of 29 known individuals.•Calls could be reliably …

The ability to recognize and be recognized underlies the social behavior of many animals.
Individual-level recognition holds special importance in intra-specific recognition, where it is …

The ability to vary the characteristics of one's voice is a critical feature of human
communication. Understanding whether and how animals change their calls will provide …

Variation in formant frequencies has been shown to affect social interactions and sexual
competition in a range of avian species. Yet, the anatomical bases of this variation are …

Animal vocalisations play a role in individual recognition and mate choice. In nesting
penguins, acoustic variation in vocalisations originates from distinctiveness in the …

An animal's ability to recognize another individual by matching their image to their voice
suggests they form internal representations of other individuals. To what extent this ability …

Highlights•African penguins spontaneously recognize their partner visually.•Penguins rely
strongly on their ventral dot patterns for individual recognition.•Penguins may have holistic …