Abstract
Song type matching has been hypothesized to be a graded signal of aggression; however, it is often the case that variation in matching behavior is unrelated to variation in aggressiveness. An alternative view is that whether an individual matches a song is determined mainly by syntactic rules governing how songs are sequenced. In song sparrows (Melospiza melodia), two such rules are the cycling rule, which directs that a bird cycles through its song types in close to the minimum number of bouts, and the bout length rule, which directs that a long bout of a song type is followed by a long interval before that song type is sung again. The effect of these rules on matching is confirmed here for a population of eastern song sparrows. Territorial males were challenged at the end of a recording session with playback of one of their own song types. Logistic regression showed that the probability of matching the playback song type increased with the length of the interval since the subject had last sung that song type, as predicted by the cycling rule. The probability of matching decreased as prior bout length increased, as predicted by the bout length rule. In a multivariate logistic regression, interval length and prior bout length were both associated with matching and together correctly predicted matching in 81.3% of cases. The results support the syntactic constraints hypothesis, which proposes that matching is a non-signaling by-product of internal rules governing the ordering of song type sequences.
Significance statement
Vocal matching has attracted widespread interest in large part because it seems an effective method of directing an aggressive message at a particular recipient. Here, we show that in an eastern population of song sparrows, decisions on whether to match another bird are largely determined by internal rules of syntax governing how a singer sequences its song types, rather than by variation in aggressiveness or other individual traits. These results support the view that vocal matching is an incidental byproduct of internal mechanisms controlling the ordering of vocalization types and so is not a signal at all. This hypothesis may be broadly applicable to vocal matching in other species.
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Data are deposited on Figshare https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20483550.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Susan Peters for independently classifying answer songs into song types. We are grateful to Dr. Corinne Richards-Zawacki and the staff of the University of Pittsburgh’s Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology for logistical support, to the Pennsylvania Game Commission for access to study sites, and to the Robert E. Maytag Research Fund of the University of Miami and Duke University’s Trinity College of Arts and Sciences for financial support. We thank Jeff Podos and two anonymous reviewers for helpful advice on the manuscript.
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All procedures used in this study were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees of the University of Miami (protocols #14-049 and #20-055-LF), Duke University (protocols #A004-17-01 and #A260-19-12) and the University of Pittsburgh (protocols #18052783 and #21059264). All applicable national and institutional guidelines for the ethical treatment of animals were followed. The research was conducted with free-living birds that were not captured or otherwise handled for this study.
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Searcy, W.A., Chronister, L.M. & Nowicki, S. Syntactic rules predict song type matching in a songbird. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 77, 12 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-022-03286-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-022-03286-3