Journal
INTEGRATIVE ZOOLOGY
Volume 17, Issue 5, Pages 731-740Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1749-4877.12545
Keywords
bats; male quality; territorial calls; trade‐ off; vocal performance
Categories
Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [31872680, 31922050, 31670390]
- Fund of the Jilin Province Science and Technology Development Project [20180101024JC]
- IReL
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This study found a vocal performance trade-off in the territorial calls of male Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bats, characterized by a negative correlation between syllable repetition rate and frequency bandwidth. Additionally, the results showed a negative relationship between body mass and vocal deviation, indicating a potential link between vocal performance and caller quality in bats.
Signals containing parameter trade-offs are likely to be honest indicators of signaler quality because they are difficult to produce. Signals with a trill-rate/bandwidth trade-off have been described for many songbird species, one mouse, and one non-human primate species. However, there were no reports about whether there is a vocal performance trade-off in social calls of bats. This study investigated (1) a possible vocal performance trade-off in territorial calls of male Great Himalayan leaf-nosed bats, Hipposideros armiger, recorded from 9 locations in south China, and (2) the relationships between vocal performance (vocal deviation and consistency) and caller's quality (body mass) to determine whether vocal performance honestly indicates a caller's quality. Vocal deviation measures the deviation of a call relative to an extreme call and vocal consistency measures the spectral consistency across a string of syllables. Our results showed a significant negative correlation between syllable repetition rate and frequency bandwidth, suggesting a vocal performance trade-off similar to the one in songbirds. Further, there was a significant negative relationship between body mass and vocal deviation, but no significant correlation between body mass and vocal consistency. This study provides the first empirical evidence for a vocal performance trade-off of social calls in bats, and the potential for the level of performance to indicate caller quality.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available