EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Comparative bioacoustics of multiple eastern versus western songbird pairs in North America reveals a gradient of song divergence

Lan-Nhi Phung and David P L Toews

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 12, 1-23

Abstract: Vocalizations are one of the key premating reproductive barriers that could affect species formation. In song-learning birds, vocal traits are sometimes overlooked in species delimitation, as compared to morphological or plumage-based differences. In this study, we assessed geographic variation in songs of eight pairs of oscines on two scales: (1) comparing primary songs of species/subspecies pairs whose breeding grounds are eastern and western counterparts of each other in the continental North America, and (2) for each counterpart, identifying and comparing possible variation among their populations. We found that there were strong differences in the songs between eastern and western taxa, though the magnitude of that difference was not correlated to a mitochondrial DNA-based estimates of divergence. Additionally, we found that within-taxa geographic variation was not common in our focal taxa, beyond a single species (Townsend’s warbler, Setophaga townsendi). The result of this study provides a standardized, quantitative comparison of eastern and western songbirds, and serves as the foundation to explore the possible effectiveness of vocalizations as a reproductive barrier at this geographic scale.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0312706 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.13 ... 12706&type=printable (application/pdf)

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:plo:pone00:0312706

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0312706

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-05
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0312706