| This is the first study on the male song of the Javan silvery gibbon (Hylobates moloch), and the first quantitative evaluation of the syntax of male solo singing in any gibbon species carried out on a representative sample of individuals. Because male gibbon songs generally exhibit a higher degree of structural variability than female songs, the syntactical rules and the degree of variability in male singing have rarely been examined. In contrast to most other gibbon species, mated silvery gibbons do not appear to produce duet song bouts but solo song bouts only, and male singing is exceptionally rare, making this study particularly challenging. For the present study, we tape-recorded and analysed several solo song bouts of eight silvery gibbon males,... |
