EAPSI: Understanding how animals communicate and cooperate in response to predators

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Most conspicuous animal behaviors are related to communication. Crickets chirp, frogs chorus, and birds sing. Signals like these are not reserved for private conversation, but are inherently social signals involving numerous senders and receivers. This network perspective has been slow coming. Mobbing calls are signals used both within and across species to communicate about predators. They can encode important information about predators. Successful mobbing calls attract numerous individuals and species to the predator's location to drive it from the area. Mobbing events do not appear to be random, but organized networks with complex species interactions. Therefore, they offer unique opportunities to test the network perspective and how interspecific communication dictates species interactions and community structure. This project will be conducted in collaboration with Dr. Robert Magrath at Australian National University. Dr. Magrath is a behavioral ecologist who has been instrumental in shattering the old framework of animal communication.This project will address how information is being encoded in mobbing calls and how this information is used by other species in a communication network. It will be one of the first applications of the network perspective to communication signals. Data from this project will add generalizability to the patterns of communication network assembly. This work will be done in the Australian National Botanic Gardens using birds that are evolutionary distinct from North American birds. The project will use playbacks and predator models to test how two Australian bird species are encoding information about predators. And with these results, a time-synched microphone array will be deployed to record which species are using the encoded information and how they are using it. The conclusions from this research will advance our understanding of animal communication, predator-prey interactions, and community assembly. This NSF EAPSI award is funded in collaboration with the Australian Academy of Science.