Excellent fairy -tale (left) is trying to reflect the cuckoo
David Old
More than 20 species of birds around the world use a similar “dreaming” anxiety to prevent birds, such as cuckoos. The call seems to be understood by different types, and its specific use hints at How could language ariseField
Cuckoo are one of a number of some 100 species known as parasites of a brood This lays eggs in the nests of others BirdsTrying to convince the hosts of incubation and caring for the cubs, as if they were their own offspring of the hosts.
Will At the Donyan biological station in Spain and his colleagues, 21 species of birds were now discovered, which was the last time shared by a common ancestor about 53 million years ago, they all use structurally similar “cheekbones” of vocalization, when they find a brood parasite.
The view includes Excellent fairy tale (Malur Cialanus) in Australia, Tawny-Flanceed Prinia (Pronya Subflav) In Africa, sheet Kamyshevs Humah (Sylvia Humumi) in Asia and greenish reeds (Phylloscopus trochiloides) in Europe.
“All these different birds from all over the world seemed to converge to the use of the same vocalization to designate their appropriate parasites of the brood,” says Finni.
Researchers found that the species that make this alarm often live in areas where there are many parasites with conclusions that use many different types of owners, and when potential hosts hear how nagging, they try to scare away the invader with an aggressive physical mobby.
“Parasites brood pose this unique threat. They pose a huge threat to your offspring, but do not pose a threat, ”says Feni. “Our data suggest that [the call] In order to attract birds as quickly as possible, potentially to help. ”
“For excellent fairy tales, because they are cooperative breeders, it is quite possible that mobbing is designed to attract other people to participate in mobbins,” says Rosa Torogud At the University of Helsinki in Finland.
To conduct a further investigation, Finni and his colleagues played the records of calls made by the masters from other continents for potential birds-acceptors in Australia and China. They discovered that they hear foreign warnings are caused by the same quick response as the hearing calls made by their own types.
“This indicates that the function of this vocalization is to facilitate communication between species, and not just inside,” says Feni.
Thorogood warns: “Perhaps not that they have hereditary, ancient general anxiety in relation to the parasites of the brood, but rather it may be that there is a certain acoustic feature, which, according to the visible, is very successful in driving away the parasites of the conclusion.”
The team also conducted a similar experiment on reproduction in the territories of yellow reeds (Setofag Potocchia) in North America, which are used as egg incubators with brown cow birds (Molotrus Ater), but do not make a distinctive bell for whining alarm signals. Hearing the alarming calls of an excellent fairy tale, the cums reacted with a quick return to their nests in the same way as other calls indicating stress, and not to mobbing.
Feini says that this suggests that there is an innate component for anxiety signals that many species of birds react to, but birds in areas where the brood parasites are common, adapted a challenge and reaction to transmit local risk knowledge.
“They accepted a passionate challenge of vocalization and re -profiled it for use in a new context, which poses a high threat to offspring,” he says. “This explains why all these birds from all over the world use a similar sound.”
Charles Darwin Thinking in his book 1871 Human descent The origin of the conversational language can be monitored for simulating and modifying instinctive sounds that people and other animals produce. Examples of this can be a creak if you are afraid or a scream made in response to pain. “Birds that adapt these innate calls for another goal can become the first step to the tongue,” says Finni.
Rob Magrat The Australian National University says: “The calls often have special values, and in some cases they relate to external objects or events, and not just report on internal states, such as fear, or attributes such as gender or species.”
“This link means that such challenges are akin to human words that often relate to external objects or events,” he adds. “Thus, communication with animals and the human language, in the visible, are on the continuum, and not” language “, which are a unique human peculiarity.”
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