Aggressiveness, reliable signaling and survival in a wild songbird
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Evolutionary Studies, Zoology
- Keywords
- honest signaling, territoriality, personality, aggression, survival, song sparrows
- Copyright
- © 2015 Akçay et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Aggressiveness, reliable signaling and survival in a wild songbird. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1195v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1195v1
Abstract
The evolution and maintenance of honest or reliable signaling has been a major question in evolutionary biology. The question is especially puzzling for a particular class of signals used in aggressive interactions: threat signals. Here we report a study on song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) in which we assayed males with playbacks in their territories to quantify their aggressiveness and aggressive signaling levels and asked whether these affect their survival on territory. We found that the effect on survival of residual signaling (signaling above or below the level predicted by their aggressiveness) depended on aggression levels such that among males with low aggression, those with higher residual signaling scores had higher survival. The residual signaling did not have a strong effect among high aggression males. Aggressiveness by itself did not have an effect on survival. These results present a first step in understanding the fitness consequences of honest signaling in aggressive contexts.
Author Comment
This paper is currently under peer review.