TY  - JOUR
A1  - Tietze, Dieter Thomas
A1  - Martens, Jochen
A1  - Fischer, Balduin S.
A1  - Sun, Yue-Hua
A1  - Klussmann-Kolb, Annette
A1  - Päckert, Martin
T1  - Evolution of leaf warbler songs (Aves: Phylloscopidae)
T2  - Ecology and evolution
N2  - Songs in passerine birds are important for territory defense and mating. Speciation rates in oscine passerines are so high, due to cultural evolution, that this bird lineage makes up half of the extant bird species. Leaf warblers are a speciose Old-World passerine family of limited morphological differentiation, so that songs are even more important for species delimitation. We took 16 sonographic traits from song recordings of 80 leaf warbler taxa and correlated them with 15 potentially explanatory variables, pairwise, and in linear models. Based on a well-resolved molecular phylogeny of the same taxa, all pairwise correlations were corrected for relatedness with phylogenetically independent contrasts and phylogenetic generalized linear models were used. We found a phylogenetic signal for most song traits, but a strong one only for the duration of the longest and of the shortest element, which are presumably inherited instead of learned. Body size of a leaf warbler species is a constraint on song frequencies independent of phylogeny. At least in this study, habitat density had only marginal impact on song features, which even disappeared through phylogenetic correction. Maybe most leaf warblers avoid the deterioration through sound propagation in dense vegetation by singing from exposed perches. Latitudinal (and longitudinal) extension of the breeding ranges was correlated with most song features, especially verse duration (longer polewards and westwards) and complexity (lower polewards). Climate niche or expansion history might explain these correlations. The number of different element types per verse decreases with elevation, possibly due to fewer resources and congeneric species at higher elevations.
KW  - Model of evolution
KW  - Phylloscopus
KW  - phylogenetic signal
KW  - Seicercus
KW  - song evolution
Y1  - 2015
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/36511
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-365112
SN  - 2045-7758
N1  - © 2015 The Authors. Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ , which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 5
IS  - 3
SP  - 781
EP  - 798
PB  - John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
CY  - [S.l.]
ER  -