Brief Overview: RCMA Project

Greetings! This post will provide a brief summary of my project, how I got to this point, and where it's headed from here. Enjoy!

I began working with Dan Albrecht-Mallinger, a graduate student at the University of Wyoming, in the fall of 2017. He has been working with C. mentalis for several years at various lek sites in Panama. Using data gathered by him, Camilo Alfonso (another grad student in Panama), and other Tarwater lab members, I've been assessing whether or not these birds have an individual identity that can be derived from their calls and songs alone.

The recordings are of males at lek, which is the name for a site where multiple males gather regularly to display and perch. By distilling their calls into numerical components-- duration, frequency, et cetera-- I hope to address the question of whether we as scientists can determine individual identity based on call. This would give us invaluable insight into the population of C. mentalis across the Isthmus of Panama, and since these birds are very vulnerable to climate change, monitoring changes in their population can help us understand the processes and effects of a rapidly changing environment. So far, I've only been able to address the duration of one particular call. The results are VERY promising! They indicate a distinct difference between individuals. See the image post "Poster from the Undergraduate Research Symposium 2018" for more on this early work. I'm working on other calls, other variables, and the predictability of the difference, and soon I'll know which call is the most indicative of individual identity.

In January I will be traveling to Panama to perform an experiment of my own: We know the birds express an identity in their call, but can they themselves distinguish between other individuals? To address this, I will be recording and playing back the distinctive call of a neighboring male and that of a foreign male and measuring the aggression response. Hypothetically, the male should react more aggressively to a male it doesn't know at all than to a male it is familiar with. In addition, I will be taking recordings of vocalizations at this time to explore how ambient noise, specifically highway traffic, impacts the calls of these birds.

Hopefully I'll be able to make some more detailed posts in time. I'm so thrilled to be doing this work!

Cheers,

Josephine

Helpful links:

Laramie site for Dan A-M http://engagelaramiescience.weebly.com/

University of Wyoming http://www.uwyo.edu/

Tarwater lab site https://www.tarwaterlab.com/