The nutritional stress hypothesis explains how learned features of song, such as complexity
and local dialect structure, can serve as indicators of male quality of interest to females in …

Publisher Summary This chapter outlines the evolution of geographic variation in birdsong.
Studies of vocal signals in birds offer potentially useful opportunities for empirical tests of the …

Female songbirds are thought to assess males based on aspects of song, such as repertoire
size or amount of singing, that could potentially provide information about male quality. A …

Analyzing the function of song and its evolution as a communication signal provides an
essential backdrop for understanding the physiological and neural mechanisms responsible …

The sexual responsiveness of female canaries, Serinus canaria, to six different types of male
song phrases extracted from natural song was tested. Copulation solicitation displays were …

Male humpback whales produce complex songs during the breeding season, yet the singing
behaviour of males and whether songs function in male contests and/or through female …

Motor constraints on vocal production impose a trade–off between trill rate and frequency
bandwidth within birdsong. We tested whether domesticated canary (Serinus canaria) …

Bird song, like many other male secondary sexual characters, may have evolved as intra-or
inter-sexual signals of male phenotypic quality. The hypotheses that song rate and song …

Male canaries, Serinus canaria, sing a special phrase ('A') that elicits very high levels of
sexual display in conspecific females. This phrase is characterized by the repetition of a …

The study of bird song has made significant contributions to the develop-ment of modern
ethology (Konishi, 1985; Konishi, Emlen, Ricklefs, and Wingfield, 1989; Catchpole and …