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Habitat-induced changes in song consistency affect perception of social status in male chickadees

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Abstract

The ability of male black-capped chickadees to maintain consistent internal structure between successive iterations of their songs is affected by both their social rank and the quality of their habitat. Lab studies reveal that female chickadees discriminate between songs of dominant and subordinate males, which vary in acoustic structure. We investigate whether males also rely on acoustic structure to assess rival quality during agonistic interactions, and whether habitat-induced differences in song consistency affect the perception of male rank. We conducted a playback experiment to simulate territorial intrusions by dominant, stimuli males into the territories of dominant, subject males; stimuli males were recorded either in low-quality (young forest) or high-quality (mature forest) habitats. Stimuli from low-quality habitat had lower song consistency than those from high-quality habitats, despite being recorded from males of equivalent social rank. Subject males for playbacks (also socially dominant males) were chosen from either habitat type. Subject males in mature forest responded less to young-forest stimuli compared to mature-forest stimuli, despite the stimuli in both cases being recorded from dominant males. Conversely, male subjects in young forest did not differentiate between stimuli, but their response to both stimuli was lower than that of mature-forest subject males to mature-forest stimuli. We demonstrate that the ability to maintain internal song structure in the black-capped chickadee constitutes a signal that appears to be used by males to assess the level of threat of intruders, and that this perception is affected by habitat from which the stimulus males were recorded.

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Regis Didier for assistance in the field and the John Prince Research Forest for logistic support. Funding was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada) and the University of Northern British Columbia. Dezene Huber, Hugues Massicotte, Brian Aukema, Glenda Prkachin, and Laurene Ratcliffe provided helpful feedback on earlier drafts of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Resources and Environmental Studies, University of Northern British Columbia, 3333 University Way, Prince George, BC, V2N 4Z9, Canada

    Thibault Grava, Angélique Grava & Ken A. Otter

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  1. Thibault Grava
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  2. Angélique Grava
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  3. Ken A. Otter
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Correspondence to Ken A. Otter.

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Communicated by M. Hughes

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Grava, T., Grava, A. & Otter, K.A. Habitat-induced changes in song consistency affect perception of social status in male chickadees. Behav Ecol Sociobiol 67, 1699–1707 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-013-1580-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-013-1580-z

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