A study oncalls or “laughs” from 26 hyenasin captivity shows thatvariations in pitch and timbre encode information about your age, domain, and identity, and can help these animals establish social hierarchies.
“The hyena’s laughter provides cues to assess the social position of the sender individual. This may allow themestablish food rightsand organize their food collection activities “, explains Frédéric Theunissen, from the University of California (USA), who has published the conclusions of his study with these animals in the journalBMC Ecology.
The researchers found that, while the tone of the laugh reveals the age of a hyena,variations in the frequency of notes can encode information about dominant and subordinate status. These vocalizations mainly occur when several animals are reunited without all of them being guaranteed access to a slaughter, and it has been considered a gesture of submission.
Theunissen and his colleagues also suggest that laughter could be asign offrustrationmeant to ask for help. “Lions often eat prey previously killed by hyenas. A solitary hyena has no chance of fighting a lion, while a group of hyenas can often face one or two lions and retrieve their food,” says the researcher. Thecooperationand thecompetencethey are everyday components of a hyena’s life. “When they hear an individual ‘laughing’, the whole clan can receive information about who is frustrated (their individual identity, age, status), and they decide to join in the laugh or ignore it and walk away,” he adds. Scientists plan to test these hypotheses with new experiments.
