We attempted to disentangle factors driving peer interaction by examining reunion behavior across several social isolation and separation manipulations.

Female degus are known to be affiliative with multiple other individuals, including unrelated and unfamiliar conspecifics, offering an opportunity to study social motivation independent from exclusive pair-bonds or overt, same-sex competition. for social touch or companionship, as well as drives that are specific to particular peers, and which ultimately serve to reestablish relationships between the individuals. This phenomenon may involve general drives, e.g. Many animals become more motivated to interact after a period of isolation. Black streak in the center of the “whine” example syllable represents background noise. Two syllable categories, barks and grunts are not included because post-hoc examination revealed the syllables were typically misclassified “mixed” category syllables are also not shown due to the inherent diversity of the category. Panels in the upper-right show a map syllables in an abstract, two-dimensional projection (using t-SNE, see also S4 Fig), with all recorded syllables across experiments labeled in gray, and the syllable plotted within the box of the spectrogram identified with a red asterisk. Box outlines in the center of each plot indicate the specific syllable classified-time outside of the box is provided for context. Variation of y- and y-axes is also illustrated by the blue bars in the lower-left hand corner of each plot (vertical bars indicate frequencies up to 4000, horizontal indicate 200 ms of time), and amplitude strengths with right-side colorbars. Axes vary across panels: whistle, chirp, chitter, groan, low whistle, tweet, and whines are plotted up to 8000 Hz (y-axis), while chaff, loud whistle, squeal, and warble are plotted up to 20,000 Hz. Panels show example syllables, with spectral frequencies (y-axis) over time (x-axis) plotted with darker colors reflecting stronger amplitudes. S3 Fig: Example spectrograms across twelve scored vocalization categories.

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