Female and male plumage colour signals aggression in a dichromatic tropical songbird
Section snippets
Study Species and Field Data Collection
The lovely fairy-wren is a small nonmigratory bird, endemic to the wet tropics of Australia that breeds throughout the year, but primarily in the dry season (Leitão et al., 2019). It is a facultative cooperative breeder that forms long-term pair bonds and maintains territories year round. Resident males, females and subordinates engage in coordinated territorial disputes that can escalate to physical aggression between same-sex opponents (Leitão et al., 2019). Adult males and females are
Behavioural Responses to Mirror Image Stimulation
Individuals changed their behaviour when the mirror was exposed, spending less time at intermediate distances and more time close to the mirror (experiments 1 and 2, paired-sample Wilcoxon test: Z = −2.68, N = 106, P < 0.01) as well as far from it (Z = −3.09, N = 106, P < 0.01). Two per cent of females and 17% of males performed displays towards the mirror (feathers erected, wings extended) and 40% of females and 60% of males pecked or swooped at the mirror (physical contact with the mirror; Appendix
Discussion
Using mirror image stimulation to experimentally assess aggressive behaviour in close-range same-sex interactions, we showed that female and male lovely fairy-wrens both reacted more aggressively to their mirror image reflection when they were less ornamented themselves (i.e. less blue or shortwave-rich colours). However, experimental manipulations of the cheek plumage revealed the opposite pattern: individuals with enhanced (richer in shortwaves) cheek colour behaved more aggressively towards
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to R. Shepperd, P. Chaon, G. Marini, Z. Zelazny, L. Nelson and I. Mestre for field assistance and scoring videos over the 2015 and 2016 seasons and B. Venables for his support during field work. We thank M. Elgar for the spectrophotometer and useful feedback on the project, O. Branquinho for helping with the figures, P. De Geest for providing bird photos, the Mulder Lab, K. Meyers and J. Macdonald for helpful discussions that improved this work, and I. Leitão and C. Funghi for
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2022, Animal BehaviourCitation Excerpt :More than half of the subordinates stayed in the group for 2 years. The species is dichromatic and dimorphic, and both males and females and subordinate males sing and engage in coordinated territorial disputes (Leitão, Hall, Venables, et al., 2019). The species may breed intermittently throughout the year when conditions are favourable but with a peak in the dry season (August–November; Leitão, Hall, Venables, et al., 2019).
Female aggression towards same-sex rivals depends on context in a tropical songbird
2022, Behavioural ProcessesCitation Excerpt :The significance of each model was evaluated using a type II ANOVA the car package in R (Fox and Weisberg, 2011). As some behavioral responses during mirror assays were infrequent among individuals (e.g., displays), we enumerated the total amount of aggressive behaviors as one variable after the mirror was exposed to the individual following the statistical methods of Leitão et al. (2019) and Jones et al. (2022): strikes, pecks, soft songs, and displays. Although vocal behaviors are important in white-shouldered fairywren territorial intrusion contexts (Jones et al., 2021), both sexes rarely sang while in cage and not frequently enough for statistical analysis as a stand-alone variable.
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2021, Animal BehaviourCitation Excerpt :For example, in a species of a monochromatic songbird (Poecille atricapillus), to the human perception, white plumage patches signal sex – males bear brighter whiter plumage than females – and black patches signal social rank – high-ranked males, who are preferred by females, bear darker patches (Mennill et al., 2003). In a species of a sexually dichromatic songbird, Malurus amabilis, females and males with experimentally increased black cheek patches showed stronger aggressive responses in assays confronting their own images in mirrors, suggesting that black patches signal competitive ability in both sexes (Leitão et al., 2019). In antbirds, some eumelanic dark plumage patches are present in both females and males across many species, for example, those in wing covert feathers (Zimmer & Isler, 2003).
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