Staying ahead of the game –plasticity in chorusing behavior allows males to remain attractive in different social environments

The dynamic nature of many breeding aggregations, where the composition and attractiveness of a male’s competitors is ever changing, places extreme pressure on advertising males to remain competitive. In response to this challenge, males may adjust the properties of their calls, or change when they signal relative to their nearest neighbors, which are likely their strongest competitors. We used two playback experiments - one simulating a conspecific environment and the other simulating a mixed-species environment - to test the hypothesis that males use social plasticity in signal features, signal timing, or both, to remain attractive. Further, we examined whether this plasticity is mediated by selective attention, through which males change calling behavior in response to the most relevant competitors, while disregarding less relevant rivals. We find that males change some temporal call features, but rely strongly on signal timing to remain attractive relative to rivals. Simultaneous as...

诸多繁殖聚群均具有动态特性，雄性竞争者的组成与吸引力始终处于变化之中，这给开展求偶广告的雄性带来了维持自身竞争力的极端选择压力。为应对这一挑战，雄性个体可调整其鸣唱的声学属性，或是改变信号发出的时机，以适配大概率为其最强竞争对手的近邻同类。我们开展了两项回放实验：一项模拟同种环境，另一项模拟混合物种种群环境，以此验证下述假说：雄性可通过信号特征、信号时机，或二者兼具的社会可塑性来维持自身的求偶吸引力。此外，我们还探究了该社会可塑性是否由选择性注意所介导：即雄性会针对最具相关性的竞争对手调整鸣唱行为，而忽略关联性较弱的竞争者。研究结果表明，雄性会调整部分时域鸣唱特征，但相较于竞争对手，它们主要依赖信号时机的调控来维持自身吸引力。与此同时，……