MOBBING CALLS OF BLACK-CAPPED CHICKADEES: EFFECTS OF URGENCY ON CALL PRODUCTION

By M. C. Baker, April M. Becker. 2002

108 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Many animals advertise the presence of a predator threat through vocal signals. Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapilla) use their chick-a-dee call as a mobbing call when encountering a perched hawk or owl. This social signal appears to serve as an alert to other chickadees, causing them to rally to the vicinity of the predator and join in a chorus of calling. We asked the question: do chickadees vary the mobbing call in a manner that could convey the immediacy of threat from a potential predator? We examined the responses of chickadees to a taxidermic mount of an avian predator presented at distances of 1 m and 6 m from each subject. Vocal responses were recorded and analyzed for response latency, calling rate, and syllable composition of calls. During 5-min trials, the subjects responded more quickly and produced significantly more chick-a-dee calls for predator presentations at the 1-m distance than at the 6-m distance. Alterations of syllable composition of the call also were observed under the two treatments. These results suggest that information about the immediacy of threat or proximity of a predator may be signaled by alteration of the rate of calling, with possible additional information contained in proportional changes in the different syllable types of the call. Studies of referential (symbolic) communication in birds and mammals often have failed to consider the problem of response urgency separately from predator-type labeling in vocal signal design.

Subfields: Developmental Biology, Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f3461c1f77a559c0ac2638b7236e925cc46241a

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Citations in the corpus

Chapter 8 Survivor Signals (2009, background): “Black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapilla) produce significantly more chick-a-dee calls to near than distant predators, while the syllable composition also differed between the two conditions (Baker and Becker, 2002).”
The versatility of graded acoustic measures in classification of predation threats by the tufted titmouse Baeolophus bicolor: exploring a mixed framework for threat communication (2010, methodology): “Mexican chickadees Poecile sclateri vary the pitch of a single kind of alarm call (Ficken 1989) and black-capped chickadees Poecile atricapilla alter both the call rate of chick-a-dee (predator mobbing) calls (Baker and Becker 2002) and the Oikos 119: 264 276, 2010”
Production and perception of situationally variable alarm calls in wild tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella nigritus) (2010, background): “…long been recognized in the sciurid rodents (reviewed in Blumstein 2007), such alarm call systems have more recently been reported in birds (e.g., Baker and Becker 2002; Leavesley and Magrath 2005; Templeton et al. 2005), carnivores (Manser 2001; Furrer and Manser 2009), and some primates…”