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- Title
A kulturális evolúció nyomai az örvös légykapó (Ficedula albicollis) énekében.
- Authors
ÉVA, VASKUTI; SÁNDOR, ZSEBŐK; GÁBOR, HERCZEG; GYÖRGY, BLÁZI; MIKLÓS, LACZI; GERGELY, NAGY; JÁNOS, TÖRÖK; ZSOLT, GARAMSZEGI LÁSZLÓ
- Abstract
The process of cultural evolution - which is based on social learning through information transferred between individuals or generations instead of genetic inheritance - is one of the main factors that determined human evolution. However cultural evolution is not only an idiosyncrasy of human beings, but it also has a great importance in animals. One of the basic requirements of cultural evolution is that individuals copy behavioral traits from each other, which is well-studied in bird song. When such copying occurs among individual songbirds, the elements of their song, so called syllables, will not be randomly distributed, but structured in time and space. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed 1740 songs of 103 collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis) males from a population of the Pilis Mountains (Hungary), where songs were recorded between 2005 and 2010. We defined 476 syllable types within the population. To examine if the similarity in males' song follows a temporal or spatial structure, we calculated similarity matrices based on the overlap of syllable use and compared them by using Mantel-test. We found that the composition of the population's song is organized in time: certain syllables become temporally spread than turn rare over the years. Furthermore, the song of those males who sing closer in time to each other shows greater similarity than of those who sing at higher temporal distance. The detected temporal patterns depended on the considered scale, as the differences between non-consecutive years were more emphasized than between consecutive years. We could not prove the existence of the spatial structure in the song data, probably due to the limitations of available data. In summary, our results could partially support the hypothesis that cultural evolution can appear in the song of the collared flycatcher.
- Publication
Állattani Közlemények, 2016, Vol 101, Issue 1/2, p25
- ISSN
0002-5658
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.20331/AllKoz.2016.101.1-2.25