Julie E Danner

Smithsonian Institution

In cooperatively breeding animals, genetic relatedness among group members often determines the extent of reproductive sharing, cooperation and competition within a group. Studies of species for which cooperative behaviour is not entirely based on kinship are key for understanding the benefits favouring the evolution and maintenance of cooperative...

Abstract ∙ Many tropical birds have slow‐paced life history strategies, exhibiting lower metabolic rates, reduced annual investment in reproduction, and longer lifespans relative to birds at higher latitudes. Life history strategies have been relatively well documented in adult individuals in the tropics, but we know comparatively little about the...

The incidence of extra-pair paternity (EPP) is highly variable across bird taxa. While EPP is known to affect reproductive variance, the causes of temporal variation in rates of EPP are poorly studied. Breeding density has often been proposed as an important factor influencing EPP variation, but it has received mixed support. Over a 5-year period w...

Background noise can interfere with acoustic communication. Signal modifications have the potential to increase signal-to-noise ratios and reduce the masking effect of noise. Immediate signaling flexibility , a type of vocal plasticity, allows animals to modify their signal to optimize transmission depending on ambient noise conditions. Results fro...

The soundscape acts as a selective agent on organisms that use acoustic signals to communicate. A number of studies document variation in structure, amplitude, or timing of signal production in correspondence with environmental noise levels thus supporting the hypothesis that organisms are changing their signaling behaviors to avoid masking. The ti...

Female preference for local cultural traits has been proposed as a barrier to breeding among animal populations. As such, several studies have found correlations between male bird song dialects and population genetics over relatively large distances. To investigate if female choice for local dialects could act as a barrier to breeding between nearb...

Anthropogenic noise presents a problem for acoustic communication in animal taxa around the world. Many animals respond by modifying their acoustic signals, sometimes along multiple axes, such as song structure, redundancy, or amplitude. To date, no study has assayed the relative response of animals to multiple axes of signal variation, such as son...

Soundscapes pose both evolutionarily recent and long-standing sources of selection on acoustic communication. We currently know more about the impact of evolutionarily recent human-generated noise on communication than we do about how natural sounds such as pounding surf have shaped communication signals over evolutionary time. Based on signal dete...

Analyses. This is an R script for all analyses included in the manuscript. (R)

Supporting Data. This is the data set for the manuscript. (CSV)

Moult is critical for fitness for many organisms for several reasons: it allows growth and maintains the function of the integument for protection, thermoregulation and communication. Feather moult in birds is costly and therefore typically does not overlap with migration or reproduction. In spring, the rapid succession of pre‐alternate moult, migr...

The Winter Food Limitation Hypothesis (WFLH) states that winter food abundance is a dominant source of population limitation of migratory birds. Evidence is accumulating that long-distance migratory birds wintering in tropical climates have high overwinter survival probabilities and that winter food limitation mainly affects their fitness nonlethal...

In addition to the observed high diversity of species in the tropics, divergence among populations of the same species exists over short geographic distances in both phenotypic traits and neutral genetic markers. Divergence among populations suggests great potential for the evolution of reproductive isolation and eventual speciation. In birds, song...