Vocal communication is seasonal in social groups of wild, free-living house mice

Abstract

House mice (Mus musculus domesticus) are among the most widely studied laboratory models of mammalian social behavior, yet we know relatively little about the ecology of their behaviors in natural environments. Here, we address this gap using radiotelemetry to track social interactions in a population of wild mice over 10 years, from 2013 to 2023, and interpret these interactions in the context of passive acoustic monitoring data collected from August 2022 until November 2023. Using deep convolutional neural networks, we identify 1.3 million individual vocalizations and align them in time with continuously collected telemetry data recording social interactions between individually identifiable mice. We find that vocalization is seasonal and correlated with long-term dynamics in features of social groups. In addition, we find that vocalization is closely associated in time with entrances to and exits from those groups, occurs most often in the presence of pups, and is correlated with how much time pairs of mice spend together. This work identifies seasonal patterns in the vocalizations of wild mice and lays a foundation to investigate the social role of acoustic communication in wild populations of a classic laboratory model organism.