Spying on small wildlife sounds using affordable collar-mounted miniature microphones: an innovative method to record individual daylong vocalisations in chipmunks
Open accessAbstract
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.
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Miniaturization allowed microphones to be fitted to collars or tiny backpacks for small mammals, enabling round-the-clock tracking of individual vocal behavior.
“Miniaturization pushed the frontier further: microphones could now be fitted to collars or tiny backpacks for small mammals, enabling round-the-clock tracking of individual vocal behavior”
From Listening forward: emerging roles of bioacoustics in ecology, evolution, and conservation (2026) · cites this paper as Couchoux et al. 2015
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- Authors
- Couchoux, C., Aubert, M., Garant, D., & Réale, D.
- Affiliations
- Université du Québec à Montréal (CA)
- Université de Sherbrooke (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Couchoux, Charline
- Venue
- Scientific Reports
- Published
- 2015-05-06
- Volume
- 5
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 10118-10118
- ISSN
- 2045-2322 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4650754
- OpenAlex
- W2256460946
- Cited by
- 29
- References
- 24
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 4 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 4 · 2019: 4 · 2017: 4 · 2016: 2
- FWCI
- 1.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Scientific Reports (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Geographic Society
- Université du Québec à Montréal
- Animal Behavior Society
- Nature Conservancy
- Nature Conservancy of Canada
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
- Fonds de recherche du Québec – Nature et technologies
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Developmental Biology › Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Wildlife Ecology and Conservation
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Marine animal studies overview
- Keywords
- chipmunks, animal vocal communication, interindividual variability, resting heart rate, wildlife
- MeSH terms
- Acoustics, Animals, Animals, Wild, Heart Rate, Miniaturization, Motor Activity, Sciuridae, Sound, Sound Spectrography, Tape Recording, Vocalization, Animal, Reproducibility of Results
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