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The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal

Animal signals should consistently differ among individuals to convey distinguishable information about the signalers. However, behavioral display signals, such as bird song are also loaded with considerable within-individual variance with mostly unknown function. We hypothesized that the immediate...

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Autores principales: Jablonszky, Mónika, Zsebők, Sándor, Laczi, Miklós, Nagy, Gergely, Vaskuti, Éva, Garamszegi, László Zsolt
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Oxford University Press 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8653761/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34899049
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araa132
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author Jablonszky, Mónika
Zsebők, Sándor
Laczi, Miklós
Nagy, Gergely
Vaskuti, Éva
Garamszegi, László Zsolt
author_facet Jablonszky, Mónika
Zsebők, Sándor
Laczi, Miklós
Nagy, Gergely
Vaskuti, Éva
Garamszegi, László Zsolt
author_sort Jablonszky, Mónika
collection PubMed
description Animal signals should consistently differ among individuals to convey distinguishable information about the signalers. However, behavioral display signals, such as bird song are also loaded with considerable within-individual variance with mostly unknown function. We hypothesized that the immediate social environment may play a role in mediating such variance component, and investigated in the collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) if the identity and quality of listeners could affect song production in signalers. After presenting territorial males with either a female or male social stimulus, we found in the subsequent song recordings that the among-stimulus effects corresponded to non-zero variance components in several acoustic traits indicating that singing males are able to plastically adjust their songs according to stimulus identity. Male and female stimuli elicited different responses as the identity of the female stimuli affected song complexity only, while the identity of male stimuli altered also song length, maximum frequency, and song rate. The stimulus-specific effect on song in some cases decreased with time, being particularly detectable right after the removal of the stimulus and ceasing later, but this pattern varied across the sex of the stimulus and the song traits. We were able to identify factors that can explain the among-stimulus effects (e.g., size and quality of the stimuli) with roles that also varied among song traits. Our results confirm that the variable social environment can raise considerable variation in song performance, highlighting that within-individual plasticity of bird song can play important roles in sexual signaling.
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spelling pubmed-86537612021-12-09 The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal Jablonszky, Mónika Zsebők, Sándor Laczi, Miklós Nagy, Gergely Vaskuti, Éva Garamszegi, László Zsolt Behav Ecol Original Articles Animal signals should consistently differ among individuals to convey distinguishable information about the signalers. However, behavioral display signals, such as bird song are also loaded with considerable within-individual variance with mostly unknown function. We hypothesized that the immediate social environment may play a role in mediating such variance component, and investigated in the collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) if the identity and quality of listeners could affect song production in signalers. After presenting territorial males with either a female or male social stimulus, we found in the subsequent song recordings that the among-stimulus effects corresponded to non-zero variance components in several acoustic traits indicating that singing males are able to plastically adjust their songs according to stimulus identity. Male and female stimuli elicited different responses as the identity of the female stimuli affected song complexity only, while the identity of male stimuli altered also song length, maximum frequency, and song rate. The stimulus-specific effect on song in some cases decreased with time, being particularly detectable right after the removal of the stimulus and ceasing later, but this pattern varied across the sex of the stimulus and the song traits. We were able to identify factors that can explain the among-stimulus effects (e.g., size and quality of the stimuli) with roles that also varied among song traits. Our results confirm that the variable social environment can raise considerable variation in song performance, highlighting that within-individual plasticity of bird song can play important roles in sexual signaling. Oxford University Press 2021-03-05 /pmc/articles/PMC8653761/ /pubmed/34899049 http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araa132 Text en © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) ), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Original Articles
Jablonszky, Mónika
Zsebők, Sándor
Laczi, Miklós
Nagy, Gergely
Vaskuti, Éva
Garamszegi, László Zsolt
The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal
title The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal
title_full The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal
title_fullStr The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal
title_full_unstemmed The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal
title_short The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal
title_sort effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal
topic Original Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8653761/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34899049
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/beheco/araa132
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