Advances in ethological approaches to explore rodent vocal communication

Ali Abud^1,2Yihan Wang^1,2,3Rechuma Hafter⁴Ehsan Tavakoli⁵Christina Wu⁵Senadee Atapattu⁶Ahmed Raza⁷Mohammad Ali⁸Ali Al-Hadi⁹Hamza Khalid⁷Rehmat K. Sukhija¹⁰Tobias Stoodley¹¹Alisha Joshi⁹Samar Joshi¹Morgan Lynsey Gustison^12*

• ¹Department of Biology, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada
• ²Evidentia Institute of Knowledge Synthesis, London, Canada
• ³Translational and Clinical Research Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England, United Kingdom
• ⁴Department of Biology, Hunter College (CUNY), New York City, New York, United States
• ⁵Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada
• ⁶Department of Biomedical Science and Department of Human Health and Nutritional Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, Canada
• ⁷School of Interdisciplinary Science, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
• ⁸Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
• ⁹Department of Biology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• ¹⁰Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• ¹¹Department of Psychology, University of Waikato, Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand
• ¹²Department of Psychology, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

Vocal communication is widespread across animals, from mammals to amphibians. In recent years, rodents have become an increasingly valuable group in which to study vocal communication. Rodents offer rich opportunities to examine vocalizations from proximate and ultimate ethological perspectives. Here, we identify recent advances in ethological research on rodent vocal communication by synthesizing contemporary studies from the past decade. We carried out a scoping review of research published between 2014 and 2024. This review involved a broad search for peer-reviewed original studies in APA PsycINFO, Embase, MEDLINE, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. The search yielded 403 eligible studies on rodent vocalizations. We extracted information about the ethological perspectives, species, research environment, and animal sex and age groups. We also identified studies that focused on method development. We found that rodent vocal communication studies varied across ethological perspectives, with more studies carried out on vocal mechanisms and adaptive functions than on development and evolution. These studies covered a broad range of 88 rodent species, with high species diversity in function and evolution studies and low species diversity in mechanism studies. Artificial environments were used more often than naturalistic environments, especially in mechanism and development studies. Naturalistic environments were common in function and evolution studies. Adult males were used more often than any other sex and age groups. The use of age groups, but not sexes, varied based on ethological perspective. Together, these findings highlight several advantages of contemporary rodent research, including opportunities to carry out in-depth studies of vocal mechanisms and to investigate diverse species. Based on these findings, we also identify potential areas for future research. These areas include research focused on non-mechanistic questions, as well as expanding species diversity, research environments, and animal sex and age groups. Research on rodents from multiple ethological perspectives will be crucial for building a comprehensive understanding of animal acoustic communication.