SONG DIFFERENCES IN RED-BREASTED MEADOWLARKS

BENITES, P.; GABELLI F. M.; TUBARO, P. L.

Colorado

Congreso; 2014 Joint Meeting AOU - COS - SCO; 2015

American Ornithologists Union - Cooper Ornithological Societ - Canadian Society of Ornithologists

Song is one of themost important signals in communication in birds, and the song of a givenspecies is the result of a combination of characteristics of elements withgiven temporal structures and frequency parameters. Red-breasted Meadowlarksare a group of five species within the Stunella clade that inhabit open areasin South America, three of which can be found in sympatry in the south ofBuenos Aires, Argentina. They exhibit in their song repertories two types ofsong, the perching song (PS) and the flight song (FS), which differ both instructure and in the behavioral context in which they are emitted. We evaluatedin this study the interspecific song differences of Red-breasted Meadowlarks,analyzing structural, temporal and frequency parameters of 141 songs of allfive species of the group through a PCA followed by ANOVAs on the PC factors.We found a varied degree of interspecific differences in both types of song inspecies of the group in the three categories of song parameter. Particularly,we found that song differences in the group are marked among species that are sympatric,and even more in sympatric sister species, while a greater overlap in thestructure of the song is found when comparing allopatric and more distantlyrelated species. These results suggests divergence in reproductive characters,and agree with the prediction that signals in closely related species that livein simpatry should be more divergent tan those signals in species that live inallopatry (Dobzhansky 1937, Lack 1968).