ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Phylogenetic signal in the vocalizations of vocal learning and vocal non-learning birds.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed, 38 citations in OpenAlex.
- Genetic Composition Is Unrelated to Song Content in a Wild Passerine.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Phylogeny and Body Size Predict Distress Call Divergence in Bats: A Comparative Analysis.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2025Article
- Time and place affect the acoustic structure of frog advertisement calls.Current zoology · 2025Article
- Respiratory contributions to birdsong-evolutionary considerations and open questions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Testing Phylogenetic Placement Accuracy of DNA Barcode Sequences on a Fish Backbone Tree: Implications of Backbone Tree Completeness and Species Representation.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Review
- Song determined by phylogeny and body mass in two differently constrained groups of birds: manakins and cardinals.BMC ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Migratory singers dynamically overlap the signal space of a breeding warbler community.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Leaping through Tree Space: Continuous Phylogenetic Inference for Rooted and Unrooted Trees.Genome biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Limited Song Mixing Without Genomic Gene Flow in a Contact Zone Between Two Songbird Species.Molecular biology and evolution · 2023Article
- Vocal learning in animals and humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 3 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Some animal vocalizations develop reliably in the absence of relevant experience, but an intriguing subset of animal vocalizations is learned: they require acoustic models during ontogeny in order to develop, and the learner's vocal output reflects those models. To what extent do such learned vocalizations reflect phylogeny? We compared the degree to which phylogenetic signal is present in vocal signals from a wide taxonomic range of birds, including both vocal learners (songbirds) and vocal non-learners. We used publically available molecular phylogenies and developed methods to analyse spectral and temporal features in a carefully curated collection of high-quality recordings of bird songs and bird calls, to yield acoustic distance measures. Our methods were initially developed using pairs of closely related North American and European bird species, and then applied to a non-overlapping random stratified sample of European birds. We found strong similarity in acoustic and genetic distances, which manifested itself as a significant phylogenetic signal, in both samples. In songbirds, both learned song and (mostly) unlearned calls allowed reconstruction of phylogenetic trees nearly isomorphic to the phylogenetic trees derived from genetic analysis. We conclude that phylogeny and inheritance constrain vocal structure to a surprising degree, even in learned birdsong. This article is part of the theme issue 'Vocal learning in animals and humans'.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.