Research article - Peer-reviewed, 2009
Mobbing calls signal predator category in a kin group-living bird species
Griesser, MichaelAbstract
Many prey species gather together to approach and harass their predators despite the associated risks. While mobbing, prey usually utter calls and previous experiments have demonstrated that mobbing calls can convey information about risk to conspecifics. However, the risk posed by predators also differs between predator categories. The ability to communicate predator category would be adaptive because it would allow other mobbers to adjust their risk taking. I tested this idea in Siberian jays Perisoreus infaustus, a group-living bird species, by exposing jay groups to mounts of three hawk and three owl species of varying risks. Groups immediately approached to mob the mount and uttered up to 14 different call types. Jays gave more calls when mobbing a more dangerous predator and when in the presence of kin. Five call types were predator-category-specific and jays uttered two hawk-specific and three owl-specific call types. Thus, this is one of the first studies to demonstrate that mobbing calls can simultaneously encode information about both predator category and the risk posed by a predator. Since antipredator calls of Siberian jays are known to specifically aim at reducing the risk to relatives, kin-based sociality could be an important factor in facilitating the evolution of predator-category-specific mobbing calls.Keywords
Perisoreus infaustus; family group; referential calls; semantic calls; AccipiterPublished in
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences2009, volume: 276, number: 1669, pages: 2887-2892
Publisher: ROYAL SOC
Authors' information
Griesser, Michael
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Department of Ecology
UKÄ Subject classification
Environmental Sciences related to Agriculture and Land-use
Publication Identifiers
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2009.0551
URI (permanent link to this page)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/49680