Abstract
Singing by songbirds is a complex motor skill learnt during juvenile development or, in ‘open-ended’ learners, before the onset of the breeding season. Outside of these specific periods, it is believed that birdsong does not change. Challenging this, here we demonstrate that in a seasonal songbird, social interactions during the breeding season induce a novel form of singing plasticity in naturalistic social environments. Using custom-made telemetric backpack technology to monitor song-based communication from freely-behaving canaries, we show that males temporally overlap their songs during aggressive ‘duels’. Singing duels induce an unexpected fast plasticity in song length, thereby enhancing singing performance and flexibility of a sexually-selected behavior. Remarkably, dueling canaries sing acoustically-similar songs, suggesting that competition within a specific song acoustic space drives dueling behavior. Overall, our findings reveal a previously unrecognized type of song plasticity different from the well-studied slow song plasticity as an imitation process for display purposes.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
Author contributions:
PA designed research, performed experiments, analyzed data, drafted, edited the manuscript.
SM performed experiments, analyzed data, edited the manuscript.
MG contributed to project conceptualization, edited the manuscript.
