10.5061/DRYAD.7WM37PVRT
Jablonszky, Mónika
0000-0002-2085-8069
Institute of Ecology and Botany
Zsebők, Sándor
Institute of Ecology and Botany
Laczi, Miklós
Eötvös Loránd University
Nagy, Gergely
Institute of Ecology and Botany
Vaskuti, Éva
Eötvös Loránd University
Garamszegi, László Zsolt
Institute of Ecology and Botany
Data from: The effect of social environment on bird song:
listener-specific expression of a sexual signal
Dryad
dataset
2020
FOS: Biological sciences
2020-11-12T00:00:00Z
2020-11-12T00:00:00Z
en
BEHECO-2020-0230
105587 bytes
5
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
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.
After presenting territorial collared flycatcher males with either a
female or male social stimulus, we recorded their song and extracted
several song traits from the recordings to investigate whether the song is
influenced by the immediate social environment. We generally calculated
song traits from 20 songs, but we also repeated the analysis calculating
song traits for consecutive 5 songs in order to investigate the temporal
change of the effect of the social stimuli. We provide four tables,
two containing song variables calculated for 20 songs from the recordings,
including also morphological data for the listener birds among others, and
two with song variables calculated for the subsequent bins of 5 songs,
separately for the two datasets that corresponds to the experiments
using male or female listener birds.
Citation: Mónika Jablonszky, Sándor Zsebők, Miklós Laczi, Gergely Nagy,
Éva Vaskuti, László Zsolt Garamszegi (2020): The effect of social
environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal.
Behavioral Ecology, accepted manuscript Contact information:
jablonszky.monika@gmail.com Methods of analysis: R atatistical
environment, Linear Mixed Models (lme4 package) Description of files: 4
tables, containing information from different subset of data (recordings
after male or female listener, song traits calculated for 20 songs or for
5 songs Variables: the variables in the 4 tables are similar, so they are
presented together recording_ID: the unique identifier of the song
recording year: the year of the measurement ring: the ring number
of the individual, whose song was recorded aprildate_of_test: date of
the measurement, as days from April 1st age_binary: age of the focal
individual, binary, 1: one-year old, 2: more than one years old
time_till_recording: time elapsed between the removal of the listener
bird and the start of the song recording listener_Male: the ring
number of the listener male listener_Female: the ring number of the
listener female songlength: length of the focal song (s)
minimumfrequency_khz: minimum frequency of the song (kHz)
maximumfrequency_khz: maximum frequency of the song (kHz)
meanfrequency_khz: mean frequency of the song (kHz)
frequencyrange_khz: frequency range of the song (kHz) tempo: the
ratio between the number of syllables within song and song length (1/s)
complexity: the number of different syllable types/total number of
syllables within songs repertoiresize: the number of k-mean clusters
that could be detected for a given individual based on 20 songs
songrate: the number of songs in a minute calculated as 60/median of song
intervals listener_Male_tarsus: tarsus length of the listener male
(0.1 mm) listener_Male_condition: condition of the listener male
(residuals from body mass-tarsus regression separately built for the
sexes, and we also controlled for year effects by including year as a
random factor) listener_Male_wingpatchsize: the size of the wing patch
of the listener (sum of the length of the white area on the outer vanes of
the 4-8th primaries, 0.1 mm) listener_Male_foreheadpatchsize: the
size of the forehead patch of the listener (the product of the maximum
length and width of this white patch, 0.1 mm * 0.1 mm)
days_in_captivity: days the listener bird has been held in captivity
until the day of the measurement order (in the files with song traits
calculated for bins of 5 songs): order of 5 song bins along their original
order within a recording (traits were calculated for the 1-5th song,
6-10th song, etc. in the recording)