Contextual variations in calls of two non-oscine birds: the blue petrel and the Antarctic prion ...
Bird vocalizations are critical cues in social interactions as they convey temporary information varying with the social context, e.g. the signaler motivation when facing a rival or a potential mate. To date, literature mainly focuses on learning birds. Burrowing petrels (Procellariidae) are non-lea...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Dataset |
| Language: | English |
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Dryad
2021
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| Online Access: | https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8sf7m0cmj https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.8sf7m0cmj |
| Summary: | Bird vocalizations are critical cues in social interactions as they convey temporary information varying with the social context, e.g. the signaler motivation when facing a rival or a potential mate. To date, literature mainly focuses on learning birds. Burrowing petrels (Procellariidae) are non-learning birds with a limited vocal repertoire. Bachelor males communicate with conspecifics with a single call emitted in three situations: in absence of a certain auditory (spontaneous calls), towards females (female-directed calls) and toward males (male-directed calls). We first hypothesized that, although the call structure is preserved, temporal and spectral parameters vary between the three call types of bachelor males, translating different motivations (Motivation Hypothesis). To go further, we hypothesized that acoustic variations in male-directed calls indicate the signaler’s aggressive motivation and therefore the variations are similar whether calls are produced by breeder or bachelor males ... : To compare the acoustic structure of male calls according to the social situation and to their breeding status, we recorded the three call types (spontaneous, female-directed, and male-directed) from males of two burrowing petrel species, the blue petrel Halobaena caerulea and the Antarctic prion Pachyptila desolata. Records were made using field playback experiments on a small sub-Antarctic island within the Kerguelen Archipelaguo (Ile Verte, 49°51′ S, 70°05′ E) during the birds' breeding season in 2013, 2017, 2018. In total, we obtained N = 678 phrases of blue petrels (117 on breeders and 561 on bachelors) and 428 phrases of Antarctic prions (71 on breeders and 357 on bachelors). To describe and compare the call structure, we measured 34 acoustic parameters in both temporal and spectral domains at two syntactic levels (syllables and phrases) on recorded calls using the software Avisoft-SASLab Pro v5.2.11. To increase the accuracy of frequency measurements, we preliminarily downsampled recorded calls from ... |
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