ArticleEcology and evolution2019
Species-level repertoire size predicts a correlation between individual song elaboration and reproductive success.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Synthesis of Nature's Extravaganza: An Augmented Meta-Meta-Analysis on (Putative) Sexual Signals.Ecology letters · 2025Pooled it
- Singing and Calling Behavior of a Threatened Passerine With Spatially Variable Vocalizations: Individual, Population and Geographic Patterns.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Reliability of meta-analyses in ecology and evolution: (mostly) good news from a case study on sexual signals.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Birds of a song sing together: adaptive choices in the use of shared vocalizations that indicate age.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Song determined by phylogeny and body mass in two differently constrained groups of birds: manakins and cardinals.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Birds convey complex signals in simple songs.Nature · 2024Article
- Modeling how population size drives the evolution of birdsong, a functional cultural trait.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Beyond illness: Variation in haemosporidian load explains differences in vocal performance in a songbird.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Identification, Analysis and Characterization of Base Units of Bird Vocal Communication: The White Spectacled Bulbul (Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2021Article
- Species-level repertoire size predicts a correlation between individual song elaboration and reproductive success.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- Condition dependence of (un)predictability in escape behavior of a grasshopper species.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Birdsong has long been considered a sexually selected trait that relays honest information about male quality, and laboratory studies generally suggest that female songbirds prefer larger repertoires. However, analysis of field studies across species surprisingly revealed a weak correlation between song elaboration and reproductive success, and it remains unknown why only certain species show this correlation in nature. Taken together, these studies suggest that females in numerous species can detect and prefer larger repertoires in a laboratory setting, but larger individual repertoires correlate with reproductive success only in a subset of these species. This prompts the question: Do the species that show a stronger correlation between reproductive success and larger individual repertoires in nature have anything in common? In this study, we test whether between-species differences in two song-related variables-species average syllable repertoire size and adult song stability over time-can be used to predict the importance of individual song elaboration in reproductive success within a species. Our cross-species meta-analysis of field studies revealed that species with larger average syllable repertoire sizes exhibited a stronger correlation between individual elaboration and reproductive success than species with smaller syllable repertoires. Song stability versus plasticity in adulthood provided little predictive power on its own, suggesting that the putative correlation between repertoire size and age in open-ended learners does not explain the association between song elaboration and reproductive success.
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