Geographic Variations in Songs of the Yellow-bellied Prinia (Prinia flaviventris)
Date Issued
2005
Date
2005
Author(s)
Chan, Shih-Fan
DOI
en-US
Abstract
The Yellow-bellied Prinia (Prinia flaviventris) is a common resident bird species in the lowlands and foothills in Taiwan. We analyzed the songs of 150 Yellow-bellied Prinia recorded throughout the island of Taiwan to reveal the patterns of geographic variations in different song characters and the potential mechanisms that led to such patterns. In the physical characters of the song, we found the frequency-related characters had different trends of variations at different geographic scales. At the inter-population scale, we found these characters were positively correlated with the regional mean of the mean temperature in the breeding season. At the intra-population scale, we found these characters were negatively correlated with the mean temperature in the breeding season and positively correlated with the relative humidity in some populations. These within-population associations should be the results of differential transmission efficiencies in different micro-climatic conditions. We used the distances to the nearest cities and roads as indirect indices of human disturbances to test if birds sing songs with a higher frequency near cities or roads to avoid the human-produced low-frequency noises. The hypothesis was not supported. The time-related characters varied among the northern, the southwest, and the southeast populations at inter-population scale, but we did not test any candidate hypothesis about the process of this pattern. The note types varied among the western, the northeast, and the southeast populations, which reflected the isolating effects of mountain ranges between populations. The within-population variations in the relative frequency of each note type followed the predictions of the neutral hypothesis, suggesting that these variations were the results of cultural mutation and cultural drift.
Subjects
灰頭鷦鶯
鳴唱聲
地理變異
Yellow-bellied Prinia
song
geographic variation
SDGs
Type
other
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