Abstract
Many species are known to use vocalizations to recruit con- and heterospecifics to mobbing events. In birds, the vocalizations of the Family Paridae (titmice, tits and chickadees) are well-studied and have been shown to recruit conspecifics and encode information about predation risk. Species use the number of elements within a call, call frequency or call type to encode information. We conducted a study with great tits (Parus major) in the field where we presented taxidermy mounts of two predators of different threat levels (tawny owl, Strix aluco, and sparrowhawk, Accipiter nisus) and compared the mobbing calls of these two contexts. We hypothesized, based on results of studies in other paridae species, that tits vary the number or type of elements of a call according to predatory context. We found great tits to vary the number of D elements and the interval between those elements. Great tits produced significantly longer D calls with more elements and longer intervals between elements when confronted with a sparrowhawk (high-threat) compared to a tawny owl (low-threat) mount. Furthermore, birds produced more D calls towards the high-threat predator. This suggests that the basic D calls are varied depending on threat intensity.
Highlights
Animals transmit information in various ways with vocal, visual and olfactory signals being the most common ones
Tonal, and D calls in response to both predators
The number of D calls was significantly higher in the sparrowhawk treatment compared to the tawny owl treatment and increased with increasing number of conspecifics
Summary
Animals transmit information in various ways with vocal, visual and olfactory signals being the most common ones. Japanese great tit parents (Parus minor) produce distinct alarm calls when confronted with three of their main nest predators[15,26,29]. Our goal was to investigate if wild-living great tits might use fine-scale acoustic variations in their mobbing calls as an additional way of encoding information about predatory threats. We presented great tits two avian predator species that greatly differ in the proportion of great tits in their diet and pose different predation risk to this species Both predators are common in southwest Germany in general and in our study area in particular[34,35] and are known to prey on small passerine birds including great tits[36,37,38,39]. We hypothesized that great tits do use call rate and type[23] and some fine scale acoustic measures[16] to discriminate between the two predators
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