Mashona Mole-Rat Automatic Individual Identification Based on the Mating Calls

In this study was tested mole-rat vocalization for presence of diverse individually distinctive features. An automatic system based on the GMM-UBM was used for individual recognition. The system distinguishes the recordings of the five mole-rats females. The overall achieved identification accuracy is 76.7%, the lowest 59.2%, and the highest 83.5%. The overall percentage is thus high enough to prove that the mating calls of the Mashona mole-rat can carry information about mole-rat individuality. Our results showed that studied vocal signals in the Mashona mole-rats are individually specific which indicates the possibility of individual vocal recognition in this species.