Journal
BIOLOGY LETTERS
Volume 15, Issue 4, Pages -Publisher
ROYAL SOC
DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2019.0059
Keywords
female bird song; sex differences; sex-specific communication; female songbirds
Categories
Funding
- European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant) [703999-YnotSing]
- U.S. National Science Foundation [1612861]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Div Of Biological Infrastructure [1612861] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Historically, bird song has been regarded as a sex-specific signalling trait; males sing to attract females and females drive the evolution of signal exaggeration by preferring males with ever more complex songs. This view provides no functional role for female song. Historic geographical research biases generalized pronounced sex differences of phylogenetically derived northern temperate zone songbirds to all songbirds. However, we now know that female song is common and that both sexes probably sang in the ancestor of modern songbirds. This calls for research on adaptive explanations and mechanisms regulating female song, and a reassessment of questions and approaches to identify selection pressures driving song elaboration in both sexes and subsequent loss of female song in some clades. In this short review and perspective we highlight newly emerging questions and propose a research framework to investigate female song and song sex differences across species. We encourage experimental tests of mechanism, ontogeny, and function integrated with comparative evolutionary analyses. Moreover, we discuss the wider implications of female bird song research for our understanding of male and female communication roles.
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