On today’s episode of the Mongabay Newscast we speak with Dena Clink, a scientist studying individuality and variation within Bornean gibbon calls. She’s here to play us some of the recordings of gibbons that she’s made in the course of her research.

We’ve heard a wide variety of bioacoustic recordings here on the Mongabay Newscast, but they’re usually used to study wildlife at the population level, or even to study whole ecosystems. It turns out that studying how calls vary from gibbon to gibbon can not only help us learn about their behaviors but also to better protect them in the wild.

On today’s episode, Dena Clink, a post-doctoral researcher with the Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology, tells us why it’s important to study the calls of individual gibbons, how she’s going about studying individuality and variation in gibbon calls, and how that can help inform conservation strategies for the primates.

Here’s this episode’s top news:

• Malaysia’s last Sumatran rhino dies, leaving Indonesia as the final refuge
• Indonesia fires emitted double the carbon of Amazon fires, research shows
• Amazon deforestation rises to 11 year high in Brazil
• Agroforestry program in Appalachia receives $590,000 in federal funding

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Follow Mike Gaworecki on Twitter: @mikeg2001

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