Evolution of leaf warbler songs (Aves: Phylloscopidae)

  • 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.

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Author:Dieter Thomas Tietze, Jochen MartensORCiDGND, Balduin S. Fischer, Yue-Hua Sun, Annette Klussmann-KolbGND, Martin Päckert
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-365112
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.1400
ISSN:2045-7758
Pubmed Id:https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25691998
Parent Title (English):Ecology and evolution
Publisher:John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Place of publication:[S.l.]
Document Type:Article
Language:English
Date of Publication (online):2015/01/20
Date of first Publication:2015/01/20
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2015/01/20
Tag:Model of evolution; Phylloscopus; Seicercus; phylogenetic signal; song evolution
Volume:5
Issue:3
Page Number:18
First Page:781
Last Page:798
Note:
© 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.
HeBIS-PPN:36750720X
Institutes:Biowissenschaften / Institut für Ökologie, Evolution und Diversität
Dewey Decimal Classification:5 Naturwissenschaften und Mathematik / 59 Tiere (Zoologie) / 590 Tiere (Zoologie)
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Sammlung Biologie / Sondersammelgebiets-Volltexte
Licence (German):License LogoCreative Commons - Namensnennung 4.0