We all have neighbors and it’s easy for disputes to come up. When this happens, communicating is key to moving past the issue, but what if you don’t speak the same language as your neighbor? In a diverse ecosystem like the Amazon, there are many bird species all singing their own tunes. But a team a researchers led by Dr Joseph Tobias and Dr Nathalie Seddon from the Edward Grey Institute, University of Oxford found two competing species of antbirds that have evolved to sing the same song in order to effectively communicate and compete. The research was published in the journal Evolution in September.
Heading to Peru and Bolivia, the team of researchers studied three sites where the Peruvian warbling-antbird and the yellow-breasted warbling antbird make their home. In one of the sites, the two antbirds lived together and in the other two sites, the antbirds were isolated from one another. The researchers studied the songs, calls and plumage color of both species- the calls and plumage color didn’t indicate any co-evolution, but the songs did. Using the 504 song recorded from 150 individual birds, the researchers played the songs to each of the species in each of the three sites.
The territorial bird songs were treated as equally threatening to both species of birds, especially in the site where the birds lived together. The last shared ancestor of the species was more than 3 million years ago, and according to Dr. Tobias, this recent convergence of threat songs is almost equivalent to humans and chimpanzees using the same language. The study offers strong evidence of how important a factor social interaction is in evolution.
Photo Credit: Joseph Tobias
