Male song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) sing with eventual variety, repeating each song type in a consecutive series termed a ‘bout.’ A new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that in switching between song types, they follow a ‘cycling rule,’ cycling through their repertoires in close to the minimum possible number of bouts.
Male song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) deliberately shuffle and mix their song repertoire possibly as a way to keep it interesting for their female audience. Image credit: Mdf / CC BY-SA 3.0.
Song sparrows are a common songbird throughout North America, but only males sing. They use their song to defend their turf and court mates.
When wooing, they belt up to 12 different two-second songs, a repertoire that can take nearly 30 min to get through, since they repeat the same song several times before going on to the next track.
In addition to varying the number of repeats, males also shuffle the order of their tunes each time they sing their discography.
However, a big unknown had been whether males change up their song order and repeats by accident or by design.
To get some data on whether or not the birds intentionally shuffle and mix their tunes, a team of ornithologists from Duke University and the University of Miami loaded up the recording gear, trekked out to the backwoods of northwest Pennsylvania, set up mics pointed to the trees and patiently waited for five hours a day.
After recording the full suite of songs from more than 30 individuals, they pored over visual spectrographs of the trills and analyzed how often each song was sung and in what order.
The first clue that males keep tabs on their tweets to avoid repetition was that much like a Spotify playlist, males generally sing through their full repertoire before repeating a song.
The researchers also found that the more a sparrow sang a given song, the longer he took to get back to that song, possibly to build up hype and novelty once that song was played again.
For example, if a male sang Song A 10 times in a row, he’d sing even more renditions of his other songs before returning to Song A again. Alternatively, if Song A was only warbled three times during a set, then a male song sparrow might recite a shorter rendition of the rest of his repertoire in order to return to the still novel and underplayed Song A.
Taken together, these findings demonstrate that song sparrows possess an extremely rare talent with an equally uncommon name: long-distance dependencies.
It means that what a male song sparrow sings in the moment depends on what he sang as much as 30 min ago. That’s a 360 times larger memory capacity than the previous record holder, the canary, who can only juggle about five seconds worth of song information in this way.
While impressive, the implications from this work for humans are less clear. It does suggest that the order of words in human language, which is similarly impacted by long-distance dependencies may not be as unique as once thought.
It remains to be seen whether better shuffling ability gives males an advantage at finding love.
Perhaps females maintain interest in a mate who mixes it up more, and are less likely to sneak off with another male.
As with daytime talk shows, paternity tests are a good proxy for monogamy in birds, so counting how many chicks are sired by a female’s nest mate versus another bird in the neighborhood may be a future project for the team.
“For now, it’s just speculation whether these shuffling song sparrows give Spotify a run for their money to keep a female’s interest, but does highlight our similar approach at the gym,” said Duke University’s Professor Stephen Nowicki.
“You’ve got your playlist for running and the reason you’ve got that is because running is kind of boring.”
“You know that these 10 songs are going to keep you motivated, but if you are going to run for 20 songs long, why not shuffle it so the next time you don’t hear the same songs in the same order?”
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William A. Searcy et al. 2022. Long-distance dependencies in birdsong syntax. Proc. R. Soc. B 289 (1967): 20212473; doi: 10.1098/rspb.2021.2473
Source link: https://www.sci.news/biology/melospiza-melodia-songs-10497.html
