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Behavioral Ecology Advance Access published online on June 19, 2009
Behavioral Ecology, doi:10.1093/beheco/arp085
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Evolution and life-history correlates of female song in the New World blackbirds

J. Jordan Price

Department of Biology, St. Mary's College of Maryland, 18952 E. Fisher Road, St. Mary's City, MD 20686, USA

Address correspondence to J. Jordan Price. E-mail: jjprice{at}smcm.edu.


  Abstract

Female song is much more prevalent in tropical than in temperate songbirds but, we know surprisingly little about the evolutionary origins of this striking latitudinal difference. Here I reconstruct the evolution of female song in the New World blackbird family (Icteridae) and compare historical changes in this trait to changes in several other life-history characters: social mating system, nesting pattern, and migratory behavior. Reconstructions using both parsimony and maximum likelihood methods show that female song has been lost repeatedly in this clade and that tropical ancestors with frequent female song almost invariably were monogamous, had dispersed nest sites, and were nonmigratory. Losses of female song were not consistently associated with changes in any single life-history characteristic across the family, but rather appear to have occurred for different reasons in different lineages, including the evolution of migration in the oriole genus (Icterus), the evolution of brood parasitism in the cowbirds (Molothrus), and the evolution of polygynous, colonial breeding in the oropendolas (Psarocolius, Gymnostinops) and caciques (Cacicus). These results support previous suggestions that the prevalence of female song in the tropics is largely explained by the life-history traits associated with tropical habitats.

Key words: ancestral state reconstruction, comparative methods, duetting, female bird song, life history, phylogeny.

Received 3 March 2009; revised 24 April 2009; accepted 26 May 2009.


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