Meeting Abstract
Cities are evolutionarily recent environments that impose novel selection pressures on organisms. Recent research in acoustic communication in urban contexts has found that birds change their vocalizations in the presence of human generated noise. An as of yet unexplored question asks, how do young birds learn songs in the face of urban noise? We explore how young males choose songs to copy and how these choices may drive cultural evolution and sexual selection in a behavioral model, white-crowned sparrows (Zonotrichia leucophrys). We test whether males preferentially copy songs less masked by city-like noise and the consequences of these decisions for the vocal performance of their learned songs. We find males copy less masked songs significantly more than songs masked more extremely by noise. Further the presence of noise appears to affect the complexity and vocal performance of their copied songs. These results suggest how cities may impact cultural selection, and we discuss the evolutionary implications of these findings for how birds cope acoustically in urban environments.
