Female birds 'jam' their mates' flirtatious songs

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Female birds 'jam' their mates' flirtatious songs

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*Female birds 'jam' their mates' flirtatious songs*

...........THE HINDU newspaper (13th March 2009)

 

London (IANS): Female antbirds will sing over the songs of their male

partners to jam their messages from getting through to solitary female

that may be around, a new study has found. Males respond by singing a

different tune. The findings offer the first evidence that such " signal jamming "

and " jamming avoidance " occur between mates, said researchers.

 

" Signal jamming is most commonly associated with attempts to scramble

information in radio, radar, or cell phone signals, " said Joseph Tobias of

University of Oxford.

 

" The females in our study try to do a similar thing with the songs of

their partner, but the overall situation is more analogous to a wife

continually interrupting her husband to stop him from flirting with a single

woman, " he added. Social animals produce a wide range of communal displays, many

of them remarkable feats of complex coordination, the researchers said. One

example is the duets sung by pairs of Peruvian warbling antbirds.

So far, scientists have disagreed about how coordination between

displaying individuals evolved, some seeing it as a cooperative signal of

coalition quality, others as a selfish means to avoid signal overlap.

 

The new study provides the first evidence that the avoidance of signal

overlap is sufficient to explain the coordination and complexity of

communal signals.

 

In a series of playback experiments, the team found that resident pairs of

antbirds sing coordinated duets when responding to rival pairs. But under other

circumstances, cooperation breaks down, leading to more complex songs.

 

Specifically, they report that females respond to unpaired sexual rivals by

jamming the signals of their own mates, who in turn adjust their signals to

avoid the interference.

 

Tobias said the females' attempts to jam their partners' songs are

presumably intended to make the males less attractive, or to make it

clear that they are " taken. "

 

He added that the results in antbirds may have broad implications for

understanding how communal signals have developed over evolutionary time in many

animals, and perhaps even in humans, said an Oxford release.

 

The study was published online in Thursday's edition of *Current

Biology*.

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N.Shiva Kumar, NOIDA