Temporal patterns of broadcast calls in the corncrake encode information arbitrarily

Paweł Ręk and Tomasz S. Osiejuk

Behavioral Ecology, 2013, vol. 24, issue 2, 547-552

Abstract: By combining different vocalizations, in different ways, animals have the potential to vastly increase the range of information that can be encoded in acoustic signals. Although such a mechanism is hard to apply in species having small repertoires, individuals can increase the amount of information by separating vocalizations with intervals of different length, that is, with vocalizations functioning as commas and intervals as carriers of information. Nevertheless, there has been little study of information encoding using temporal arrangement of single call types. We have recently shown that male corncrakes (Crex crex) produce such temporal patterns in correlation to their aggressive motivation and these elicit the according behavior in the receivers. In this study, we report that the design of these patterns is arbitrarily related to their function. The aggressive information is encoded in the syntactic pattern itself, not in the absolute length of intervals, and thus signal variants appear to transfer different kinds of information without any association with the structure of signal variants. The finding of such coding in acoustic signaling in species with innately programmed call structures implies a much larger flexibility and complexity of communication systems of animals in general and in species with low repertoires of genetically coded vocalizations in particular.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/ars196 (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:24:y:2013:i:2:p:547-552.

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 ().