Abstract
Avian predators vary in their degree-of-threat to chickadees; for example, smaller owls and hawks are of higher threat to chickadees as they can easily maneuver through the trees, while larger predators cannot. We conducted an operant go/no-go discrimination task to investigate the effect of signal degradation on perceived threat. Chickadees were trained to respond to high-threat northern saw-whet owl (NSWO) or low-threat great horned owl (GHOW) calls that were recorded at short distances, and then tested with high- and low-threat owl calls that were rebroadcast and re-recorded across six distances (25 m, 50 m, 75 m, 100 m, 150 m, and 200 m). Subjects were further tested with high-threat and low-threat synthetic tones produced to mimic the natural calls across the six distances. We predicted that birds would perceive and respond to: (1) high-threat predator calls at longer distances compared to low-threat predator calls, and (2) synthetic tones similarly compared to the stimuli that they were designed to mimic. We believed chickadees would continue to perceive and respond to predators that pose a high threat at further distances; however, only responding to low-threat stimuli was consistent across distance recordings. Synthetic tones were treated similarly to natural stimuli but at lower response levels. Thus, the results of this study provide insights into how chickadees perceive threat.
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Acknowledgements
All animal studies were conducted in accordance with the Canadian Council on Animal Care Guidelines and Policies and with approval from the Animal Care and Use Committee for Biosciences for the University of Alberta, and the University of Calgary Life and Environmental Sciences Animal Care Committee. Chickadees were captured and research was carried out under an Environment Canada Canadian Wildlife Service Scientific permit, Alberta Fish and Wildlife Capture and Research permits, and City of Edmonton Parks Permit. This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) (Grant nos. 249884, 412311) Discovery Grant and Discovery Accelerator Supplement, an Alberta Ingenuity Fund (AIF) New Faculty Grant, a Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI) New Opportunities Fund (NOF) and Infrastructure Operating Fund (IOF) grants along with start-up funding and CFI partner funding from the University of Alberta (UofA) to CBS. JVC and KAC were each supported by an Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship-Doctoral (NSERC CGS D). We would like to thank the undergraduate students that supervised our operant chambers throughout the length of the experiment: Erica Cheung (Research Assistant), Alyshia Skurdal (Undergraduate Research Stipend), and Brenna Schuldhaus (NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award).
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Congdon, J.V., Hahn, A.H., Campbell, K.A. et al. Can you hear me now? The effect of signal degradation on perceived predator threat in black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus). Anim Cogn 24, 193–204 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01433-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-020-01433-9