Cue occlusion as a playback tool to investigate multimodal signalling of attractiveness in ring doves (Streptopelia risoria)

Activity: Talks and presentationsPoster presentationScience to Science

Description

Courtship typically occurs in multiple sensory modalities, and components possibly carry unique or redundant information, while a response to the entire signal may differ from the combined responses to its parts. The role of individual sensory modalities in mate choice has often been studied using cue isolation, where receiver responses to signals presented separately in each modality are compared with responses to multimodal courtship. Here, we used a cue occlusion approach to investigate the contribution of auditory and visual channels in the ring dove (Streptopelia risoria). Over 7 consecutive days in a between-animal design, 3 groups of 7 females viewed either audiovisual playback of male bow-coos (AV), video of a male with audio of a vacuum cleaner (V), or auditory courtship while foliage was displayed on the screen (A). We examined frequency of behaviours between conditions. While general activity (measured by number of steps) was unaffected by condition, overall preening showed a clear effect of playback content, with birds preening most often in AV, followed by V, and least often in A. Expression of sexual behaviours varied greatly between individuals, possibly obscuring between-condition effects. Interestingly, we found unexpected and very clear differences in female vocalizations across conditions: birds in A only made perch coos (a kind of contact call), while V birds tended to make nest coos (a sexual signal that also acts to self-stimulate the female), and AV birds vocalized rarely. These results suggest that the visual courtship component is an important context cue for females. Future work needs to account for female inter-individual variability in expression of sexual behaviours.
Period15 Aug 2023
Event titleBehaviour 2023
Event typeConference
LocationBielefeld, Germany, North Rhine-WestphaliaShow on map
Degree of RecognitionInternational