Careless whispers cost chicks
Females stray when mates lose song battles.
3 May 2002
JOHN WHITFIELD
Female birds that overhear their partner lose a singing contest are more li=
kely
to mate sneakily with another male, researchers have found1.
Just two defeats send a female looking for alternative mates. "Females are
deciding who's going to father their children on the basis of a six-minute
interaction," says zoologist Tom Peake of the University of Copenhagen,
Denmark. "That's got to worry pretty much every male on the planet."
Female eavesdropping shows that there's more to fighting than letting the
combatants know who's boss - everyone within earshot is also picking up
information.
Daniel Mennill of Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, went into the wo=
ods
to do battle with male black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla). He
provoked the birds using a laptop loaded with song recordings.
Full text
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020429/020429-14.html
References
Mennill, D. J., Ratcliffe, L. M. & Boag, P. T. Female eavesdropping on male
song contests in songbirds. Science, 296, 873, (2002).
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