ArticleNature communications2020
Nuthatches vary their alarm calls based upon the source of the eavesdropped signals.
Article in Nature communications, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Nestling birds learn socially to eavesdrop on heterospecific alarm calls through acoustic association.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Cavity nesting birds show behavioural plasticity to simulated territorial intrusions in response to natural resource pulses.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Connecting and integrating cooperation within and between species.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- The relative contribution of acoustic signals versus movement cues in group coordination and collective decision-making.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Wild animals suppress the spread of socially transmitted misinformation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Interspecific Drought Cuing in Plants.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Spontaneous vocal coordination of vocalizations to water noise in rooks (Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Anti-Predation Responses to Conspecific versus Heterospecific Alarm Calls by the Nestlings of Two Sympatric Birds.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Bio-acoustic tracking and localization using heterogeneous, scalable microphone arrays.Communications biology · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Animal alarm calls can contain detailed information about a predator's threat, and heterospecific eavesdropping on these signals creates vast communication networks. While eavesdropping is common, this indirect public information is often less reliable than direct predator observations. Red-breasted nuthatches (Sitta canadensis) eavesdrop on chickadee mobbing calls and vary their behaviour depending on the threat encoded in those calls. Whether nuthatches propagate this indirect information in their own calls remains unknown. Here we test whether nuthatches propagate direct (high and low threat raptor vocalizations) or indirect (high and low threat chickadee mobbing calls) information about predators differently. When receiving direct information, nuthatches vary their mobbing calls to reflect the predator's threat. However, when nuthatches obtain indirect information, they produce calls with intermediate acoustic features, suggesting a more generic alarm signal. This suggests nuthatches are sensitive to the source and reliability of information and selectively propagate information in their own mobbing calls.
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Registered trials
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