Vocal performance in birdsong is an aggressive signal in both females and males: Experimental evidence from a field study in European robins

Birdsong often serves as a territorial signal, and vocal performance (the degree of vocalising close to vocal production or respiratory limits) can play a role in expressing a sender’s aggressiveness. However, this is rarely studied in females, in which song has historically been considered non-functional. Here, we investigate male and female European robins, Erithacus rubecula, in which both sexes sing to defend their exclusive winter territory. We compared spontaneous song to song experimentally provoked by playbacks simulating territorial intrusions. Our study is the first to show that both sexes similarly increased vocal performance when territorially challenged, regardless of the simulated intruder’s sex. This provides evidence that female song is perceived as equally territorially challenging as male song and expresses aggressiveness similarly. Additionally, females sang shorter songs than males, and in both sexes, vocal performance was lower when singing longer songs, an effect t..., , # Vocal performance in birdsong is an aggressive signal in both females and males: Experimental evidence from a field study in European robins

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.x0k6djhxd](10.5061/dryad.x0k6djhxd)

## Description of the data and file structure

The study was carried out on the campuses of the Universities Paris-Saclay and Paris-Nanterre, in France. Songs of 26 territorial European robins, 13 males and 13 females, were recorded from October 2019 to November 2022. We present measurements of bioacoustic parameters (in numeric form) obtained using Avisoft SASLab Pro software, accompanied by the corresponding metadata.

## Files and variables

We provide 5 csv files along with the R script file ([Rscript_Bosca_etal_2025.R](https://datadryad.org/downloads/pre_submit/4157024 \"Download from Dryad\")) used in our analysis:

* data_VGD.csv
* data_GED.csv
* data_SD.csv
* data_elements.csv
* data_lqmm.csv

They contain the datasets required to replicate our statistical analyses. Please fi...,