Abstract
Alarm calls are usually used to signal the presence of a threat to members of the same species and have been studied broadly in social foraging species. We analysed the effects of conspecific alarm calls on the parental behaviour of a territorial species, the southern house wrens (Troglodytes aedon musculus), during nestling stage. We compared the parental response of adults feeding 9–11-day-old nestlings when faced with conspecific alarm calls and with a control non-sympatric species’ song broadcast from a neighbouring territory. We measured the time required by parents to return to the nest (latency) when exposed to the stimuli and estimated parent’s nest visitation rate and mean visit duration. Parents took longer to resume parental activities when we broadcast a conspecific alarm call, but they did not modify their nest visitation rate or the mean visit duration. Heterospecific songs did not seem to affect parental behaviour. Our results suggest that nesting southern house wrens can use alarm calls uttered from neighbouring territories to assess the presence of a threat and adjust their parental behaviour accordingly.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Whisky-Michelli family and Luis Martinez for allowing us to work on their ranches at Buenos Aires. We also thank Pablo L. Tubaro for facilitating song recordings from the bird sound collection of the Ornithology Division at the Museo de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia (Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Indrikis Krams for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. This work was supported by University of Buenos Aires (X434 and 20020090200117) and CONICET grants (PIP112-200901-00011) to G.J.F.
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Corral, M.G., Llambías, P.E. & Fernández, G.J. Effect of conspecific alarm calls in the parental behaviour of nesting southern house wrens. acta ethol 16, 47–51 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-012-0129-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10211-012-0129-x