Production and perception of communicatory signals in a noisy environment.

ABSTRACT: Many animals communicate in situations that make it difficult to discriminate a species' signals from those of others. Consequently, coexisting species usually have signals that differ by more than the minimum required to prevent overlap in acoustic features. These gaps between signals might facilitate detection and discrimination of degraded signals in noisy natural conditions. If so, perception of signals should have broader scope than production. We investigated this possibility by studying song production and perception of two species of birds in an especially noisy environment, the Amazonian dawn chorus. With software developed for this study, we digitally synthesized songs of two species, as well as intermediate versions of their songs. Experimental playbacks of these synthesized son

SUBMITTER: Luther DA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2665832 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature