DOI: 10.5061/dryad.fj6q573v4
title: Data from: Interspecific aggression in sympatry between congeneric tropical birds

description: Interspecific aggression may shape species distributions through
 competitive exclusion, resulting in spatial segregation, or facilitate
 sympatry as an adaptive mechanism for resource partitioning. Competitive
 exclusion results from asymmetric aggression of one species towards
 another, but if the aggressive relationship between species is symmetric,
 they may persist in sympatry. Interspecific aggression is widely cited as
 a mechanism for maintaining the distributional limits of tropical birds,
 but how it shapes the spatial dynamics of competing species that are
 sympatric over larger geographic areas is less clear. To address this
 issue, we conducted reciprocal playback experiments on two congeneric
 Antbirds — Thamnophilus atrinucha and T. doliatus — that occur in sympatry
 across a habitat matrix in Colombia to characterize their relationship as
 symmetrically or asymmetrically aggressive and analyzed point count data
 to assess the degree to which they occur sympatrically. We found weak
 evidence for competitive exclusion, with the larger T. doliatus responding
 asymmetrically to T. atrinucha, and the two species having a low
 co-detection rate during point counts. However, in spite of their 22%
 difference in body size, T. atrinucha still responded to T. doliatus
 playback in over half of our trials, and the two species co-occurred on
 nearly 25% of point counts, indicating that interspecific aggression does
 not drive complete spatial segregation. Our findings highlight how the
 degree to which one species can competitively exclude another may vary,
 especially across a dynamic landscape.
description: Data collected by locating territorial individual pairs of focal
 species and conducting playback experiments as described in body of paper.
 The data has been processed by evaluating each individual behavioral
 response variable and a principle component analysis to summarize these
 behaviors using mixed effect models in R. R code for these analyses
 included here.
description: # Interspecific aggression in sympatry between congeneric tropical birds
 [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fj6q573v4](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fj6q573v4) ## Description of the data and file structure Consolidated results of playback data and R code for analysis, Drucker et al. 2021, Behavioral Ecology **thamnophilus_analysis_compiled.R** R code used to 1\. Clean data 2\. Plot raw playback response variables 3\. Create and plot principal component analysis of response variables 4\. Model the effects of playback treatments on response variables **tham2020_responsvars_final.csv** **Column names:** * Spp: Focal species receiving playback stimulus * StimSpp: Species in the playback stimulus * Ind: Unique ID, based on locality and trial number at that locality * Date: month/day/year * binaryresponse: whether or not the bird responded to the playback or not * stdist: distance from the bird to the speaker at the beginning of the trial * srdist: closest approach to the speaker throughout the trial * latency: time in seconds to flight towards the speaker or acoustic response to the playback * TotalVR: Number of songs given during and after playback * changeVR: Number of songs given after playback minus before playback * pair: Whether or not birds responded as a pair * Rainfall: annual precipitation at a locality in mm/year * Other Responders: binary, whether or not other conspecifics respond during the experiment * OtherDol and OtherAtr: detections for different species or species groups * HeteroResponders: binar, whether or not heterospecific Thamnophilus responded during the experiment * Nigriceps: Whether or not Thamnophilus nigriceps responded to playback * Cercomacra: Whether or not Cercomacra nigricans responded to playback * Sakesphorus: Whether or not Sakesphorus canadensis responded to playback