A limit to sustained performance constrains trill length in birdsong

Summary In birds, song performance determines the outcome of contests over crucial resources. We hypothesized that 1) sustained performance is limited within song, resulting in a performance decline towards the end and 2) the impact of song length is compromised if performance declines. To test these hypotheses, we analyzed the songs of 597 bird species (26 families) and conducted a playback experiment on blue tits (Cyanistes caeruleus). Our multi-species analysis showed that song performance declines after sustained singing, supporting our hypothesis. If the performance decline is determined by individual attributes (i.e., physical condition), our results explain how trill length can honestly signal quality. Our experiment showed that longer trills of high performance elicited a stronger response during territorial interactions. However, long trills that declined in performance elicited a weaker response than short, high-performance trills. A trade-off between the duration and performance quality of a motor display can be an important aspect in communication across taxa.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  iScience

• Publication date

  2023-10-01

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.isci.2023.108206PMID 37953962PMCID 10637923
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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