title: Spying on small wildlife sounds using affordable collar-mounted miniature microphones: an innovative method to record individual daylong vocalisations in chipmunks.
abstract: Technological advances can greatly benefit the scientific community by making new areas of research accessible. The study of animal vocal communication, in particular, can gain new insights and knowledge from technological improvements in recording equipment. Our comprehension of the acoustic signals emitted by animals would be greatly improved if we could continuously track the daily natural emissions of individuals in the wild, especially in the context of integrating individual variation into evolutionary ecology research questions. We show here how this can be accomplished using an operational tiny audio recorder that can easily be fitted as an on-board acoustic data-logger on small free-ranging animals. The high-quality 24 h acoustic recording logged on the spy microphone device allowed us to very efficiently collect daylong chipmunk vocalisations, giving us much more detailed data than the classical use of a directional microphone over an entire field season. The recordings also allowed us to monitor individual activity patterns and record incredibly long resting heart rates, and to identify self-scratching events and even whining from pre-emerging pups in their maternal burrow.
authors.affiliation: Département des Sciences Biologiques, Université du Québec à Montréal, H3C 3P8 Montréal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Charline
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Couchoux
authors.affiliation: Département des Sciences Biologiques, Université du Québec à Montréal, H3C 3P8 Montréal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Maxime
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Aubert
authors.affiliation: Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, J1K 2R1, Sherbrooke, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Dany
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Garant
authors.affiliation: Département des Sciences Biologiques, Université du Québec à Montréal, H3C 3P8 Montréal, QC, Canada.
authors.forename: Denis
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Réale
mesh_terms: D000162:Acoustics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D000818:Animals; D000835:Animals, Wild / Q000502:physiology*; D006339:Heart Rate / Q000502:physiology; D008904:Miniaturization / Q000295:instrumentation*; D009043:Motor Activity; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012589:Sciuridae; D013016:Sound; D013018:Sound Spectrography; D013637:Tape Recording / Q000379:methods*; D014828:Vocalization, Animal / Q000502:physiology*