The lush canopy of Tambopata rainforest is home to an incredible diversity of wildlife, among which primates hold a significant place. Their social structures and vocalizations provide valuable insights into their behavior, ecology, and the health of their habitats. Bioacoustics has emerged as a powerful tool for studying these fascinating creatures in recent years, allowing researchers to delve deeper into the sounds of the rainforest.
Primates play crucial roles in neotropical ecosystems as pollinators and seed dispersers, modifying the forest structure and promoting species richness of understory vegetation. Wild populations in the neotropics have been adversely impacted by anthropogenic activities including industry-driven deforestation and direct hunting and trapping. These effects can be detrimental to population success considering primates’ low reproductive rate. Monitoring wild populations can give us insight into their health and ecology, their survival is intricately linked to the health of their environment, making them important indicators of ecosystem stability.
Weddell’s Saddle-back Tamarin monkey in Refugio Amazonas by Juan Diego Shoobridge
Bioacoustics is the study of the production, transmission, and reception of animal sounds. and has become an essential method for understanding the behavior and ecology of primates. Currently, we are creating a library that includes different vocalizations of the 8 primate species present in Tambopata Research Center to train existing automated detection algorithms, that then allow us to develop machine learning models.
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The Alarm Call of the Black Spider Monkey
As researchers of the 8 Primates project team, we are using a custom-built equipment to capture these vocalizations. It consists in a directional parabolic microphone to record high quality examples of each of the species’ different calls. Directional microphones were chosen for training data collection as they minimize background noise, also amplifies high frequency sounds to produce clear recordings which is beneficial as some of the primate species in Tambopata produce calls in the 8-16 kHz range. Recordings are made on mobile phones through some Apps. Tourists, volunteers, and visitors are contributing to the creation of the primate acoustic library while they experience the forest in a unique way through its sounds.
Tambopata Research Center Guests participating in the 8 primates project by Carlos Gonzales
Each species of primate has its unique vocal repertoire, which serves various functions, from alerting others to the presence of predators to facilitating social bonding within groups. For example, red Howler Monkeys are known for their loud, howling calls, which can travel for 3 to 5 kilometers away. These calls serve as territorial markers, the males communicate foraging sites between different troops to avoid competition. On the other hand, the vocalizations of Peruvian spider monkeys can vary based on the availability of food resources. During times of abundance, their calls are more frequent and varied, while during scarcity, they become less frequent and mild.
Understanding primate vocalizations has practical conservation implications. As deforestation and habitat loss threaten the survival of many primate species, bioacoustics monitoring can help track population health and distribution. By listening to the sounds, we can detect changes in primate populations and assess the overall health of the ecosystem. For instance, we calculate acoustic diversity indices as a proxy for diversity to compare areas within the Tambopata River catchment and across wider areas. Anthropogenic noise (e.g. chainsaws, gunshots, domestic dogs) can also be quantified from the same recordings.
Spider monkey howling by Paul Bertner
One of the key considerations for conservation in the Tambopata region is conserving forest in the buffer zone of the Reserve. Landowners oversee a wide range of land uses in the buffer zone, including conservation initiatives, sustainable use, and wildlife tourism, as well as agriculture and extractive activities less compatible with wildlife conservation. The large area and human use associated with these areas makes monitoring challenging. The project monitors wildlife through bioacoustics, using relatively cheap equipment and citizen science involvement. This method allows us to engage local people in conservation efforts, we are working on implement, and promote low-cost, robust citizen science bioacoustics monitoring for primates and biodiversity in the buffer zone, involving people who doesn’t have any background in science. This is critical to the dissemination of the project on a large scale, with potential global applications. In this way, we can ensure that the sounds of the rainforest continue to echo for generations to come
Field Biologist, Tambopata Research Center
