Bioacoustic papers in Behaviour 147 - April
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/beh/2010/00000147/00000004
Abstracts below
Klenova, AV, IA Volodin, EV Volodina & KA Postelnykh (2010) Voice breaking
in adolescent red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis). Behaviour 147: 505-524.
Wilson, DR & CS Evans (2010) Female fowl (Gallus gallus) do not prefer
alarm-calling males. Behaviour 147: 525-552.
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Abstracts:
Klenova, AV, IA Volodin, EV Volodina & KA Postelnykh (2010) Voice breaking
in adolescent red-crowned cranes (Grus japonensis). Behaviour 147: 505-524.
Voice breaking is a process associated with puberty of human males that also
occurs in adolescence in some birds. This study reports the jump-like vocal
changes occurring during voice breaking in adolescent red-crowned cranes
(Grus japonensis). We investigated acoustic parameters of chirp and trill
calls during vocal ontogenesis from hatching to the age of 1.5 years in 17
male and 31 female captive red-crowned cranes and compared them with
definitive calls of 5 male and 8 female conspecific adults. During voice
breaking, trills and chirps of both sexes contained two non-overlapping
independent fundamental frequencies: the upper one, representing the
retained juvenile frequency, and the lower one, the newly attained adult
frequency. Before voice breaking, the calls contained only the upper
frequency, whereas after it only the lower one. Voice breaking occurred
between the age of 7 and 11.5 months. We test whether sex, dates of birth
and body mass gain are associated with voice breaking and speculate whether
voice breaking triggers the disruption of the parent-chick bond or vice
versa, or both events are driven by a third, yet unidentified trigger.
Wilson, DR & CS Evans (2010) Female fowl (Gallus gallus) do not prefer
alarm-calling males. Behaviour 147: 525-552.
Phenotypic traits associated with reproductive outcomes are often thought to
be under sexual selection. In fowl, Gallus gallus, the rate at which males
produce anti-predator alarm calls is an excellent correlate of their mating
and reproductive success. However, two different models can explain this
relationship. Calling, like many costly traits, may be attractive to
females. Alternatively, males that have recently mated may invest in their
mates by increasing alarm call production. Although previous work provides
strong support for the male investment hypothesis, the two hypotheses are
not mutually exclusive. In this study, we tested the mate attraction
hypothesis by manipulating male alarm calling rates in three separate mate
choice experiments. The first experiment was conducted in a highly
controlled laboratory setting. There, we used video playback techniques to
present females with simulated males that differed only in their alarm
calling responses to simulated predators. In the second experiment, females
were presented with two live males in a naturalistic outdoor setting. One
male's vocal output was supplemented with his own pre-recorded alarm calls,
and the other male's was not. In the third experiment, we combined the
realistic spatial scale of an outdoor context with the stringent
experimental control offered by video playback. The male stimuli used in
this experiment differed in their propensity to produce four intercorrelated
vocal signals that are each correlated with male mating and reproductive
success. These included aerial alarm calls, ground alarm calls, food calls,
and crows. Results from the three experiments consistently showed that
females do not prefer alarm-calling males, suggesting that male alarm
calling is not a sexually selected signal.
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