Do songbirds talk to each other during nocturnal migration, and how does this influence their migration? This is what a recent study published in Current Biology hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated the social interactions that occur among migrating songbirds and how this plays a role in migration. This study has the potential to help researchers better understand global animal behavior and the link between social interaction and nocturnal animal migration.
For the study, the researchers recorded more than 18,300 hours of nocturnal bird migrations over a three-year period across 26 North American sites. After processing the recording through AI-based deep learning algorithms, the researchers were able to identify more than 175,000 in-flight vocalizations obtained from 27 bird species, including 25 species with good vocalization samples. Through this, the team discovered social interactions among various bird species, with similar interactions occurring between birds based on wing length.
Credit: Andrew Dreelin
“Species with similar wing sizes were more likely to associate, and wing length is directly linked to flight speed,” said Dr. Benjamin Van Doren, who is an associate professor in the Department of Natural Resources & Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois-Champaign and lead author of the study. “If you imagine two species flying at similar speeds because they have similar wings, then it's much easier for them to stick together. As for vocalizations, it is possible that species’ calls have converged over time because of this social link or that species that happen to give similar calls are simply more likely to gravitate towards each other.”
Going forward, the team aspires to gather more data given the number of species analyzed for this research given the 27 species samples pales in comparison to the more than 4,000 songbird species globally.
What new discoveries about songbird social interactions will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Current Biology, EurekAlert!
