Predation as a cost of sexual communication in nocturnal seabirds: an experimental approach using acoustic signals

Conspicuous behaviour, such as sexual advertisement, exposes animals to predation; mate attraction thus often conflicts with antipredator behaviour. We investigated whether an avian predator, the brown skua, Catharacta antarctica lonnbergi, uses the mate attraction calls of colonial seabirds, the petrels. The majority of petrels attract mates at night and vocalizations are their main way of communicating. At our study sites, skua predation on nocturnal petrels was heavy, and concentrated particularly on a single species, the blue petrel, Halobaena caerulea. Using playback experiments, we showed that skuas can use male petrel calls as a cue for prey location and selection. This listening behaviour of skuas probably imposes a major constraint on advertising petrels, and especially on single males which face a trade-off between attracting females (which respond by calling in flight) and avoiding predation. We also investigated the consequences of this predation risk on the behaviour of petrels: a second set of playback experiments showed that the most heavily preyed on petrel species could use skua territorial calls to infer predation risk and stop calling thereafter, which may reduce conspicuousness and predation risk. (C) 2000 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour.