{"id":697,"date":"2014-05-01T09:00:24","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T13:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/?p=697"},"modified":"2014-05-15T13:05:22","modified_gmt":"2014-05-15T17:05:22","slug":"the-need-to-deceive-flexible-alarm-mimicry-in-an-african-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/the-need-to-deceive-flexible-alarm-mimicry-in-an-african-bird\/","title":{"rendered":"The Need to Deceive: Flexible Alarm Mimicry in an African Bird"},"content":{"rendered":"

As humans, we have all experienced deception at some point in life.\u00a0 When my sister was six, she tried cutting her bangs to look more like \u201cBelle\u201d from Beauty and the Beast<\/i>.\u00a0 Failing miserably, she was left to explain to our parents why her hair was cut diagonally.\u00a0 Ever so eloquently, she explained, \u201cI was lying face up down in the bathtub, when a razor came out of nowhere and floated across my hair!\u201d\u00a0 My parents instantly knew that she had made up the story, saving her the embarrassment of admitting her mistake.\u00a0 My sister, who had not put a lot of thought into her backstory, thought she could pass off a dishonest \u201csignal\u201d as an honest \u201csignal\u201d, benefiting herself while keeping the perceivers (my parents) in the dark.\u00a0 For similar reasons, animals in the wild have shown the ability to deceive when predation or the stress of risk is present.\u00a0 But in both the wild and in the household, deception is not always easy to get away.\u00a0 In my household, my parents knew my sister was lying because the false story (signal) was too dissimilar to the genuine one.\u00a0 In the wild, deception often fails when deceptive signals occur too often relative to their honest counterparts.\u00a0 In the wild, this poses a constraint on the degree of success when using a single, inflexible deceptive signal too often.\u00a0 One solution may be to decrease the frequency of deception, which would save the energy needed to produce the signal, but may cost energy when later fleeing a predator.\u00a0 Another solution would be to change the flexibility of the deceptive signal.\u00a0 If an individual could flexibly alter an aspect of the content or structure of the deceptive signal, the deceiver may get away with a higher frequency of deception.\u00a0 While this is an exciting idea, this flexible variation has never been observed in the wild\u2026until\u2026<\/p>\n

\"Above<\/a>

Above is the fork-tailed drongo native to Africa, or Dicrurus adsimilis.<\/p><\/div>\n

THE FORK-TAILED DRONGO.<\/p>\n

In their study published on May 2nd<\/sup> of 2014, Flower, Gribble, and Ridley wanted to see if fork-tailed drongos possessed the ability to differentially create alarm calls to scare and steal food away from a variety of different predators.\u00a0 Over the course of the research study, the 64 wild drongos observed spent over a quarter of their time following southern pied babblers and meerkats.\u00a0 When following these target species, the drongos would honestly produce true alarm class when they saw a predator approaching.\u00a0 The target species then heard this true alarm and would flee to cover in response.\u00a0 However, when an individual of the target species would find a large food item, the drongos produced false alarm class, causing the target to flee to cover, allowing the drongos to swoop in and steal food.\u00a0 But this is where it gets interesting.\u00a0 It turns out that the structure, and therefore perceived source (animal who truly produces it), of the false alarm changed in different scenarios.\u00a0 In some cases, drongos would change the duration and frequency of the alarm call to deceive the target species into thinking another animal was making the call.\u00a0 Therefore, the target species would see this as an honest alarm, as the \u201cever-deceptive\u201d drongos was not the species producing it.<\/p>\n

\"Results<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

So where does this study leave us?\u00a0 For the fork-tailed drongos, this leads to a lifestyle full of deceit and reward.\u00a0 By varying their false alarm calls, drongos actually benefit in two different ways.\u00a0 One, they produce signals more likely to deceive their targets.\u00a0 Two, they avoid target habituation to repeated use of the same deceptive signal!\u00a0 In other words, they are tricking their target species with better accuracy, more efficiently, and over a larger period of time!\u00a0 But it isn\u2019t all good news for the fork-tailed drongo.\u00a0 As the authors mentioned, \u201cflexible variation might not maintain deception indefinitely because deceived species ma ultimately habituate to all the deceptive signals in their repertoire.\u201d\u00a0 So the deceived species may eventually catch on in time, learning all the different ways drongos make false alarm calls.\u00a0 This leads to an interesting question to consider, and possible field of future study.\u00a0 Do fork-tailed drongos have the ability to create and mimic novel species?\u00a0 Can a fork-tailed drongos hear a novel alarm call and reproduce it with enough practice?\u00a0 Is this proof of theory in mind in birds?<\/p>\n

Source:\u00a0http:\/\/www.sciencemag.org\/content\/344\/6183\/513.short<\/p>\n

Flowers, T.P., Gribble, M., and Ridley, A.R. (2014) Deception by Flexible Alarm Mimicry in an African Bird.\u00a0Science, 344(513).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As humans, we have all experienced deception at some point in life.\u00a0 When my sister was six, she tried cutting her bangs to look more like \u201cBelle\u201d from Beauty and the Beast.\u00a0 Failing miserably, she was left to explain to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1929,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60058,72810],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","hentry","category-animal-physiology","category-whats-new-in-ensory-ecology","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1929"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":704,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions\/704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/sensoryecology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}