The role of singing style in song adjustments to fluctuating sound conditions: A comparative study on Mexican birds

Abstract

Many bird species adjust their songs to noisy urban conditions by which they reduce masking and counteract the detrimental impact on signal efficiency. Different species vary in their response to level fluctuations of ambient noise, but it remains unclear why they vary. Here, we investigated whether noise-dependent flexibility may relate to singing style and signal function of the flexible acoustic trait. Species with highly variable songs may generally be more flexible and strongly repetitive singers may be more limited to stray from their stringent patterns. We exposed males of four passerine species with contrasting singing styles (repertoire size, immediate or eventual variety singing and syllable diversity) to three experimental sound conditions: 1) continuous urban noise; 2) intermittent white noise and 3) conspecific song playback. We found no spectral or temporal changes in response to experimental noise exposure in any of the four species, but significant temporal adjustment to conspecific playback in one of them. We argue that the consistency in song frequency and timing may have signal value, independent of singing style, and therefore be an explanation for the general lack of noise-dependent flexibility in the four species of the current study.