Species replacement reduces community participation in avian antipredator groups

David Wheatcroft, Mario Gallego-Abenza and Anna Qvarnström

Behavioral Ecology, 2016, vol. 27, issue 5, 1499-1506

Abstract: In diverse communities, recognizing other species’ alarm signals is critical for evading predators. Recognition among community members is thought to build up predictably and quickly as individuals learn to associate previously unrecognized calls with the presence of a predator. Here, we use a natural range expansion in which a songbird species, the pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca), is being gradually displaced on a Baltic island by an ecologically similar congeneric, the collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis), to test this prediction. We conducted 2 field experiments to evaluate the abilities of both species to recruit local heterospecifics to antipredator groups, called mobs. First, we stimulated mobs by exposing breeding collared and pied pairs to taxidermied predators. Second, to isolate the effect of alarm call recognition from other potential confounds, such as behavioral cues or differences in the locations of pied and collared flycatcher nests, we broadcast alarm calls of both species in breeding areas and measured the responses of heterospecifics. We found that pied flycatcher pairs were more likely to attract heterospecifics than were collared flycatcher pairs. This difference is driven by weak responses of community members to collared flycatcher alarm calls: The alarm calls of the native pied flycatcher were much more likely to attract heterospecifics than those of the colonist, collared flycatchers. Our results show that subtle changes in species composition may have large, unpredictable consequences on community-wide communication. Because many avian breeding communities are heavily affected by predation, disturbed communication networks may, in turn, have cascading effects on community composition.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/beheco/arw074 (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:27:y:2016:i:5:p:1499-1506.

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 ().