Meeting Abstract
Despite a longstanding interest in the evolutionary origins and maintenance of vocal learning, we know little about how sociality influences vocal learning in natural populations. Naturalized populations provide exciting opportunities to study vocal learning as cultural patterns develop in real time. Monk parakeets (Myiopsitta monachus) have established naturalized populations across the world through the global pet trade. Naturalized monk parakeets in the United States converge on shared call types at nesting sites, suggesting that learned calls serve to signal group membership. It remains unclear, though, whether such learning processes are a general characteristic of the species or have changed during introduction. We examined patterns of geographic variation in the native range to test the generality of the “signaling group membership” hypothesis across multiple social scales in monk parakeets. We recorded contact calls across 405km in Uruguay. We used spectrographic cross-correlation and random forests to measure acoustic similarity and compared similarity values across social scales and geographic distance using generalized dissimilarity modeling and Mantel tests. We found low acoustic similarity within nesting sites, groups and pairs compared to individuals, and only a weak relationship between acoustic similarity and geographic distance. These results suggest that monk parakeets may not converge on shared contact calls in their native range, in contrast to previous findings with naturalized populations and other parrot species. This study serves as a baseline to ask why vocal learning processes differ among native and naturalized populations, perhaps influenced by social structure during introduction.
