Publication Date:
2004-01-24
Description:
Many birds perform visual signals during their learned songs, but little is known about the interrelationship between visual and vocal displays. We show here that male brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater) synchronize the most elaborate wing movements of their display with atypically long silent periods in their song, potentially avoiding adverse biomechanical effects on sound production. Furthermore, expiratory effort for song is significantly reduced when cowbirds perform their wing display. These results show a close integration between vocal and visual displays and suggest that constraints and synergistic interactions between the motor patterns of multimodal signals influence the evolution of birdsong.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Cooper, Brenton G -- Goller, Franz -- DC04390/DC/NIDCD NIH HHS/ -- DC05722/DC/NIDCD NIH HHS/ -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2004 Jan 23;303(5657):544-6.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Department of Biology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA. cooper@biology.utah.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14739462" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Abdominal Muscles/physiology
;
Air Sacs/physiology
;
Animals
;
Electromyography
;
Male
;
*Motor Activity
;
Movement
;
Posture
;
Pressure
;
Pulmonary Ventilation
;
*Respiration
;
Respiratory Muscles/physiology
;
Songbirds/*physiology
;
Video Recording
;
*Vocalization, Animal
;
Wings, Animal/*physiology
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
