Interspecific aggression in sympatry between congeneric tropical birds

Interspecific aggression may shape species distributions through competitive exclusion, resulting in spatial segregation, or facilitate sympatry as an adaptive mechanism for resource partitioning. Competitive exclusion results from asymmetric aggression of one species towards another, but if the aggressive relationship between species is symmetric, they may persist in sympatry. Interspecific aggression is widely cited as a mechanism for maintaining the distributional limits of tropical birds, but how it shapes the spatial dynamics of competing species that are sympatric over larger geographic areas is less clear. To address this issue, we conducted reciprocal playback experiments on two congeneric Antbirds — Thamnophilus atrinucha and T. doliatus — that occur in sympatry across a habitat matrix in Colombia to characterize their relationship as symmetrically or asymmetrically aggressive and analyzed point count data to assess the degree to which they occur sympatrically. We found weak ev..., Data collected by locating territorial individual pairs of focal species and conducting playback experiments as described in body of paper. The data has been processed by evaluating each individual behavioral response variable and a principle component analysis to summarize these behaviors using mixed effect models in R. R code for these analyses included here., , # Interspecific aggression in sympatry between congeneric tropical birds

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fj6q573v4](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fj6q573v4)

## Description of the data and file structure

Consolidated results of playback data and R code for analysis, Drucker et al. 2021, Behavioral Ecology

**thamnophilus_analysis_compiled.R**

R code used to
1\. Clean data
2\. Plot raw playback response variables
3\. Create and plot principal component analysis of response variables
4\. Model the effects of playback treatments on response variables

**tham2020_responsvars_final.csv**

**Column names:**

* Spp: Focal species receiving playback stimulus
* StimSpp: Species in the playback stimulus
* Ind: Unique ID, based on locality and trial number at that locality
* Date: month/day/year
* binaryresponse: whether or not the bird responded to the playback or not
* stdist: distance from the bird to the speaker at the beginning of the trial
* srdist: closest approach to the speaker througho...,