Birds singing in choruses must contend with the possibility of interfering with each other's songs, but not all species will interfere with each other to the same extent due to signal partitioning. Some evidence suggests that singing birds will avoid temporal overlap only in cases where there is overlap in the frequencies their songs occupy, but the extent to which this behaviour varies according to level of frequency overlap is not yet well understood. We investigated the hypothesis that birds will increasingly avoid heterospecific temporal overlap as their frequency overlap increases by testing for a linear correlation between frequency overlap and temporal avoidance across a community of temperate eastern North American birds. We found that there was a significant correlation across the whole community and within 12 of 15 commonly occurring individual species, which supports our hypothesis and adds to the growing body of evidence that birds adjust the timing of their songs in response to frequency overlap.
Same data, different conclusions: Radical dispersion in empirical results when independent analysts operationalize and test the same hypothesis
- Award ID(s):
- 1901386
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10293112
- Author(s) / Creator(s):
- ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; more »
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes
- Volume:
- 165
- Issue:
- C
- ISSN:
- 0749-5978
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 228 to 249
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation