DOI: 10.5061/dryad.7wm37pvrt
title: Data from: The effect of social environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal

description: Animal signals should consistently differ among individuals to convey
 distinguishable information about the signalers. However, behavioral
 display signals, such as bird song are also loaded with considerable
 within-individual variance with mostly unknown function. We hypothesized
 that the immediate social environment may play a role in mediating such
 variance component, and investigated in the collared flycatcher (Ficedula
 albicollis) if the identity and quality of listeners could affect song
 production in signalers. After presenting territorial males with either a
 female or male social stimulus, we found in the subsequent song recordings
 that the among-stimulus effects corresponded to non-zero variance
 components in several acoustic traits indicating that singing males are
 able to plastically adjust their songs according to stimulus identity.
 Male and female stimuli elicited different responses as the identity of
 the female stimuli affected song complexity only, while the identity of
 male stimuli altered also song length, maximum frequency and song rate.
 The stimulus-specific effect on song in some cases decreased with time,
 being particularly detectable right after the removal of the stimulus and
 ceasing later, but this pattern varied across the sex of the stimulus and
 the song traits. We were able to identify factors that can explain the
 among-stimulus effects (e.g. size and quality of the stimuli) with roles
 that also varied among song traits. Our results confirm that the variable
 social environment can raise considerable variation in song performance,
 highlighting that within-individual plasticity of bird song can play
 important roles in sexual signaling.
description: After presenting territorial collared flycatcher males with
 either a female or male social stimulus, we recorded their song and
 extracted several song traits from the recordings to investigate whether
 the song is influenced by the immediate social environment. We generally
 calculated song traits from 20 songs, but we also repeated the analysis
 calculating song traits for consecutive 5 songs in order to investigate
 the temporal change of the effect of the social stimuli.
 We provide four tables, two containing song variables calculated
 for 20 songs from the recordings, including also morphological data for
 the listener birds among others, and two with song variables calculated
 for the subsequent bins of 5 songs, separately for the two datasets that
 corresponds to the experiments using male or female listener
 birds.
description: Citation: Mónika Jablonszky, Sándor Zsebők, Miklós Laczi, Gergely
 Nagy, Éva Vaskuti, László Zsolt Garamszegi (2020): The effect of social
 environment on bird song: listener-specific expression of a sexual signal.
 Behavioral Ecology, accepted manuscript<br> Contact information:
 jablonszky.monika@gmail.com<br> Methods of analysis: R atatistical
 environment, Linear Mixed Models (lme4 package)<br> Description of
 files: 4 tables, containing information from different subset of data
 (recordings after male or female listener, song traits calculated for 20
 songs or for 5 songs<br> Variables: the variables in the 4 tables
 are similar, so they are presented together<br>     recording_ID:
 the unique identifier of the song recording<br>     year: the year
 of the measurement<br>     ring: the ring number of the individual,
 whose song was recorded<br>     aprildate_of_test: date of the
 measurement, as days from April 1st<br>     age_binary: age of the
 focal individual, binary, 1: one-year old, 2: more than one years
 old<br>     time_till_recording: time elapsed between the removal of
 the listener bird and the start of the song recording<br>   
  listener_Male: the ring number of the listener male<br>   
  listener_Female: the ring number of the listener female<br>   
  songlength: length of the focal song (s)    <br>   
  minimumfrequency_khz: minimum frequency of the song (kHz)<br>   
  maximumfrequency_khz: maximum frequency of the song (kHz)<br>   
  meanfrequency_khz: mean frequency of the song (kHz)    <br>   
  frequencyrange_khz: frequency range of the song (kHz)<br>   
  tempo: the ratio between the number of syllables within song and song
 length (1/s)<br>     complexity: the number of different syllable
 types/total number of syllables within songs<br>     repertoiresize:
 the number of k-mean clusters that could be detected for a given
 individual based on 20 songs<br>     songrate: the number of songs
 in a minute calculated as 60/median of song intervals<br>   
  listener_Male_tarsus: tarsus length of the listener male (0.1
 mm)<br>     listener_Male_condition: condition of the listener male
 (residuals from body mass-tarsus regression separately built for the
 sexes, and we also controlled for year effects by including year as a
 random factor)<br>     listener_Male_wingpatchsize: the size of the
 wing patch of the listener (sum of the length of the white area on the
 outer vanes of the 4-8th primaries, 0.1 mm)    <br>   
  listener_Male_foreheadpatchsize: the size of the forehead patch of the
 listener (the product of the maximum length and width of this white patch,
 0.1 mm * 0.1 mm)<br>     days_in_captivity: days the listener bird
 has been held in captivity until the day of the measurement<br>   
  order (in the files with song traits calculated for bins of 5 songs):
 order of 5 song bins along their original order within a recording (traits
 were calculated for the 1-5th song, 6-10th song, etc. in the
 recording)