Communication across territory boundaries: distance-dependent responses in nightingales

Philipp Sprau, Tobias Roth, Rouven Schmidt, Valentin Amrhein and Marc Naguib

Behavioral Ecology, 2010, vol. 21, issue 5, 1011-1017

Abstract: In communication, vocal signals are often used for long-range signaling. Yet, little experimental evidence is available on the role of territorial signals across territory boundaries and their effectiveness at different propagation distances. In many songbird species, song overlapping and rapid broadband trills are used and perceived as agonistic signals, yet they differ in their propagation distance. Trills degrade quickly over distance, suggesting that their agonistic function may decrease faster over distance than that of song overlapping. Here, we tested whether different signaling distances of a rival affect singing responses of a territorial male and whether such distance effects differ when a rival uses rapid broadband trills or song overlapping. We exposed male nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos) to songs of simulated rivals broadcast from 2 distances outside their territories. Each subject was exposed either to a moderate alternating playback without trills or to an agonistic playback, that is, to an alternating playback with trills or to an overlapping playback without trills. Irrespective of the treatment, males sang more songs containing trills in response to near than to far playback. As expected, males responded more strongly to the 2 agonistic treatments than to the moderate treatment. However, males did not clearly decrease responsiveness to playback containing trills broadcast from afar. This indicates that trills maintain their agonistic function even at distances at which information encoded in frequency bandwidth is degraded. Taken together, our results show that information encoded in signals used for resource maintenance is important also in communication across territory boundaries. Copyright 2010, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2010
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arq097 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:beheco:v:21:y:2010:i:5:p:1011-1017

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Behavioral Ecology is currently edited by Louise Barrett

More articles in Behavioral Ecology from International Society for Behavioral Ecology Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().