The information banded mongooses extract from heterospecific alarms

Predation is a powerful selective force shaping the behaviour of prey animals. As a consequence, a variety of birds and mammals have developed referential and/or urgency-based alarm call systems. Since antipredator behaviour is likely to be costly, it should pay to attend to warning signals given by other species. Evidence that animals respond to heterospecific alarm calls is abundant. However, studies showing whether animals extract information on predator types or urgency levels from heterospecific alarms are rare. Using playback experiments, we investigated whether banded mongooses, Mungos mungo, respond to alarm calls of several sympatric plover species, Vanellus spp. and how mongooses respond to plover alarms that differ in their level of urgency. Banded mongooses responded to alarm calls of the three plover species tested. Even though the response intensity varied over a large scale, the responses to plover alarms did not differ between calls representing high and low urgency. Our results indicate that banded mongooses use heterospecific alarms for predator avoidance but do not use additional information provided in these signals. How commonly animals attend to and why in some cases animals do not attend to additional information provided by heterospecific alarms remains an open question and deserves further investigation.