Vocal performance influences female response to male bird song: an experimental test
Vocal performance influences female response to male bird song: an experimental test
复制标题
DOI：
10.1093/beheco/arg090
复制
发表时间：
2004-01-01
影响因子：
2.4
通讯作者：
Nowicki, S
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Ballentine, B;Hyman, J;Nowicki, S
雌性鸣禽被认为根据歌唱的各个方面来评估雄性，比如曲目的大小或歌声的数量，这可能会提供关于雄性质量的信息。歌曲中一个相对未被探索的方面也可能是一种评估信号，那就是男性表演具有身体挑战性的歌曲的能力。由沼泽麻雀(Melospiza Georgiana)产生的颤音歌曲给雄性带来了表演上的挑战，因为颤音需要声道运动快速而精确的协调，导致颤音频率和频率带宽之间的权衡。这种权衡定义了对歌曲制作的约束，该约束被观察为颤音率按频率带宽在声学空间中的三角形分布，具有表示性能限制的上限。鉴于这种歌曲制作限制的背景，我们能够先验地确定哪些歌曲表演得更熟练，因此哪些歌曲应该对女性更具吸引力。我们确定了沼泽麻雀种群的表演极限，并测量了相对于这一极限的雄性个体的歌唱表现(“声乐表演”)。然后，我们比较了女性对不同男性创作的同一类型歌曲的高性能版本和低性能版本的引诱反应。女性对高性能歌曲的表现明显高于对低性能歌曲的表现，这支持了女性用声音表现来评估男性的假设。
Female songbirds are thought to assess males based on aspects of song, such as repertoire size or amount of singing, that could potentially provide information about male quality. A relatively unexplored aspect of song that also might serve as an assessment signal is a male's ability to perform physically challenging songs. Trilled songs, such as those produced by swamp sparrows (Melospiza georgiana), present males with a performance challenge because trills require rapid and precise coordination of vocal tract movements, resulting in a trade-off between trill rate and frequency bandwidth. This trade-off defines a constraint on song production observed as a triangular distribution in acoustic space of trill rate by frequency bandwidth, with an upper boundary that represents a performance limit. Given this background on song production constraints, we are able to identify a priori which songs are performed with a higher degree of proficiency and, thus, which songs should be more attractive to females. We determined the performance limit for a population of swamp sparrows and measured how well individual males performed songs relative to this limit ("vocal performance"). We then compared female solicitation responses to high-performance versus low-performance versions of the same song type produced by different males. Females displayed significantly more to high-performance songs than to low-performance songs, supporting the hypothesis that females use vocal performance to assess males.