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192
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Introduction
My research prioritizes a multidisciplinary approach combining tools from signal processing, ethology, ecology, with the aim to understand acoustic communication systems of different categories of animals. My research interest turns towards problems of communication in constraining environments (noisy environments, studied mainly in penguin colonies and absorbent environments,studied mainly in tropical forest birds). I am also interested by acoustic communication networks of birds.
Publications
Publications (192)
The song of male birds is implicated in mate attraction and territory defence and assumed to evolve through sexual selection. Song production is hypothesized to represent a biomechanical challenge under physical, respiratory and neural limitation, leading to trade-offs. Although both sexes sing in numerous species, vocal performance has been little...
Vocalisations play a vital role in animal communication, as they are involved in many biological functions such as mate selection, individual recognition and care of young. Seabirds often breed in large and dense colonies, making successful recognition between mates or between parents and offspring crucial for reproductive success. Acoustic signals...
Vocalisations play a vital role in animal communication, as they are involved in many biological functions. Seabirds often breed in large and dense colonies, making successful recognition between mates or between parents-and offspring crucial for reproductive success. Most seabird species, including Cape gannets (Morus capensis), are monomorphic an...
The structure of ecological communities is thought to be mainly driven by competition processes between species. One special case of resource shaping community dynamics is the acoustic space. However, the acoustic communities have been rarely described for tropical birds. Here, we aimed at estimating acoustic competition between the iconic species...
Passive acoustic monitoring is increasingly being applied to terrestrial, marine and freshwater environments, providing cost‐efficient methods for surveying biodiversity. However, processing the avalanche of audio recordings remains challenging, and represents nowadays a major bottleneck that slows down its application in research and conservation....
Background
Studies on animal behaviour often involve the quantification of the occurrence and duration of various activities. When direct observations are challenging (e.g., at night, in a burrow, at sea), animal-borne devices can be used to remotely record the movement and behaviour of an animal (e.g., changing body posture and movement, geographi...
Reproductive success can improve with experience, which increases with age in many long-lived species. Signals that provide reliable information about age are therefore of importance for mate choice and consequently are under sexual selection. In birds, these are often vocal signals as well as visual signals in the form of plumage coloration. King...
Bird vocalizations are critical cues in social interactions as they convey temporary information varying with the social context, for example, the signaler motivation when facing a rival or a potential mate. To date, literature mainly focused on learning birds. Burrowing petrels (Procellariidae) are nonlearning birds with a limited vocal repertoire...
In blue petrels (Halobaena caerulea), females are supposed to be particularly choosy and mate choice can take a couple of years. In these lifelong monogamous seabirds, choosing a good mate is crucial and has a strong influence on their fitness. Due to their nocturnal habits, the absence of sexual dimorphism, and the physical barrier between males c...
This note reports a field observation of a breeding site of Paleosuchus trigonatus in the protected area “Réserve Naturelle Nationale des Nouragues” in French Guiana. It includes a description of its nest, hatchlings and habitat, with an emphasis on hatchlings’ vocal signal. It also reports the result of a playback experiment on an adult.
The Mathematical Theory of Communication predicts how the amount of information of a signal is transmitted from an emitter to a receiver after propagation through the environment. This theory can be applied to explain the principles of animal communication and can be, in the acoustic domain, a strong framework to explore crucial questions on commun...
Social influences on vocal development of young birds have been widely studied in oscine songbirds who learn to sing by vocal imitation of conspecifics, mainly male adults. In contrast, vocal development of non‐vocal learners such as Galliformes is considered as being under strong genetic influence and independent of the social environment. In this...
Background:
The astonishing variety of sounds that birds can produce has been the subject of many studies aiming to identify the underlying anatomical and physical mechanisms of sound production. An interesting feature of some bird vocalisations is the simultaneous production of two different frequencies. While most work has been focusing on songb...
Information is a core concept in animal communication: individuals routinely produce, acquire, process and store information, which provides the basis for their social life. This book focuses on how animal acoustic signals code information and how this coding can be shaped by various environmental and social constraints. Taking birds and mammals, i...
Seabirds are highly vocal on land where acoustic communication plays a crucial role in reproduction. Yet, seabirds spend most of their life at sea. They have developed a number of morphological, physiological and behavioural adaptations to forage in the marine environment. The use of acoustic signals at sea could potentially enhance seabirds' forag...
Social cohesion and prey location in seabirds are largely enabled through visual and olfactory signals, but these behavioural aspects could potentially also be enhanced through acoustic transfer of information. Should this be the case, calling behaviour could be influenced by different social‐ecological stimuli. African Penguins Spheniscus demersus...
Acoustic communication in burrowing petrels has been poorly studied. However, as for many other bird species, acoustic communication seems to play an essential role in social interactions during the breeding season of these seabirds. Bachelor males call from their burrow, likely to attract females, but also when vocally challenged by other males. C...
The Resplendent Quetzal Pharomachrus mocinno is a rare Neotropical bird included in the IUCN red list as Near Threatened. Fragmentation of its habitat, the cloud forest, is considered as the principal threat. Two subspecies are currently recognised but genetic and morphometric studies suggested they could be considered as full species. We assessed...
Vocalizations of the rare and flagship species Pharomachrus mocinno (Aves: 24 Trogonidae): implications for its taxonomy, evolution and conservation 25 26 Abstract 27 The Resplendent Quetzal Pharomachrus mocinno is a rare Neotropical bird included in the IUCN 28 red list as Near Threatened. Fragmentation of its habitat, the cloud forest, is conside...
Background:
Anurans largely rely on acoustic communication for sexual selection and reproduction. While multiple studies have focused on the calling activity patterns of prolonged breeding assemblages, species that concentrate their reproduction in short-time windows, explosive breeders, are still largely unknown, probably because of their ephemer...
Seabirds spend most of their time at sea, yet our knowledge of their activities and behaviour is limited due to difficulties of in‐situ data collection. In particular, we know virtually nothing about their acoustic communication when at sea. We benefited from the recent development of miniaturised audio‐recording devices to deployacoustic recorders...
Ecoacoustic research mainly relies on signal and data analysis. Beyond manual inspection, the current solutions to decipher the content of population, community or soundscape recordings either refer to supervised classification methods that need labelled data (e.g. SVM, CNN, RF) or to global diversity indices that totally avoid species identificati...
In the context of sexual selection, animals have developed a variety of cues conveying information about the sex of an individual to conspecifics. In many colonial seabird species, where females and males are monomorphic and do not show obvious differences in external morphology, acoustic cues are an important signal for individual and sex recognit...
Acoustic recording has been recognized as a valuable tool for non-intrusive monitoring of the marine environment, complementing traditional visual surveys. Acoustic surveys conducted on coral ecosystems have so far been restricted to barrier reefs and to shallow depths (10–30 m). Since they may provide refuge for coral reef organisms, the monitorin...
The pressures of selection acting on transmission of information by acoustic signals are particularly high in long-distance communication networks. Males of the North African houbara bustard (Chlamydotis undulata undulata) produce extremely low-frequency vocalizations called ‘booms’ as a component of their courtship displays. These displays are per...
Table S1-S6 and Figure S1-S2 from Booming far: the long-range vocal strategy of a lekking bird
The source-filter theory of vocal production supports the idea that acoustic signatures are preferentially coded by the fundamental frequency (source-induced variability) and the distribution of energy among the frequency spectrum (filter-induced variability). By investigating the acoustic parameters supporting individuality in lamb bleats, a vocal...
Although mammalian vocalizations are predominantly harmonically structured, they can exhibit an acoustic complexity with nonlinear vocal sounds, including deterministic chaos and frequency jumps. Such sounds are normative events in mammalian vocalizations, and can be directly traceable to the nonlinear nature of vocal-fold dynamics underlying typic...
In songbirds, songs are learned and involved in sexual selection. The cultural transmission of songs leads to dialects between populations and ultimately to speciation. Many songbirds migrate and individual differences in migratory patterns can influence population genetic structure and boost song differentiation. The complex interactions between s...
In songbirds, territorial songs are key regulators of sexual selection and are learned from conspecifics. The cultural transmission of songs leads to divergence in song characteristics within populations, which can ultimately lead to speciation. Many songbirds also migrate, and individual differences in migratory behaviours can influence population...
Parental care is widespread in Archosaurs (birds, crocodilians, dinosaurs and pterosaurs), and this group provides a useful model for the evolution of parent-offspring interactions. While offspring signalling has been well-studied in birds, the modulation of parental care in crocodilians remains an open question. Here we show that acoustic communic...
The Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies (DMD, BMD) show significant comorbid diagnosis for autism, and the genomic sequences encoding the proteins responsible for these diseases, the dystrophin and associated proteins, have been proposed as new candidate risk loci for autism. Dystrophin is expressed not only in muscles but also in central inhi...
In otariids, mother's recognition by pups is essential to their survival since females nurse exclusively their own young and can be very aggressive towards non-kin. Antarctic fur seal, Arctocephalus gazella, come ashore to breed and form dense colonies. During the 4-month lactation period, females alternate foraging trips at sea with suckling perio...
A device for acoustically scaring avian species includes means for emitting an acoustic sequence including the repetition of a combination of at least three categories of different synthetic signals, including warning signals representative of alert noises from birds of prey, interspecies distress signals, and taking-flight signals from various spe...
Background
Vocal performance refers to the ability to produce vocal signals close to physical limits. Such motor skills can be used by conspecifics to assess a signaller¿s competitive potential. For example it is difficult for birds to produce repeated syllables both rapidly and with a broad frequency bandwidth. Deviation from an upper-bound regres...
Background
Vocal performance refers to the ability to produce vocal signals close to physical limits. Such motor skills can be used by conspecifics to assess a signaler’s competitive potential. For example it is difficult for birds to produce repeated syllables both rapidly and with a broad frequency bandwidth. Deviation from an upper-bound regress...
In tropical forest, visual communication is limited by obstacles and birds use mainly the acoustic channel to communicate at long range. However, in this dense vegetation environment, sounds may be greatly altered during transmission over distance. To be effective, information transfer
must rely upon parameters resistant to degradation, e.g., a slo...
Owing to the cost of territorial behaviour, territorial animals are able to adjust and modulate the intensity of their response according to their own condition and to the identity of the intruder. In birds, when neighbouring territorial males are well established, they often show a less intense response towards known neighbours than towards strang...
In songbirds of the temperate zone, often only males sing and their songs serve to attract females and to deter territorial rivals. In many species, males vary certain aspects of their singing behavior when engaged in territorial interactions. Such variation may be an honest signal of the traits of the signaler, such as fighting strength, condition...
Parallels between birdsong and human language are numerous and include particular temporal arrangements
of acoustic units and the existence of dialects. In animal communication, modifications of
the temporal ordering of existing acoustic units have rarely been clearly linked with changes in information
content, particularly in a natural environment...
Geographic variation in animal vocalisations, ranging
from micro- to macro-variations, has now been widely
documented. These dialects can impair communication
between separated groups or populations and thus may play
a role in speciation processes. Although the existence of geographical
variation has been already shown in some pinnipeds
species, th...
Significance
Gardiner's Seychelle frog, one of the smallest terrestrial tetrapods, resolves an apparent paradox as these seemingly deaf frogs communicate effectively without a middle ear. Acoustic playback experiments conducted using conspecific calls in the natural habitat of the frogs provoked vocalizations of several males, suggesting that these...
Skylarks inhabit open fields and perform an aerial song display which serves as a territorial signal. The particularly long and elaborate structure of this song flight raises questions about the impact of physical and energetic constraints acting on a communication signal. Song produced during the three distinct phases of the flight - ascending, le...
In spite of its importance for the understanding of the evolution of sound communication, information concerning the vocal world of crocodilians is limited. Experimental works have brought evidence of the biological roles of juvenile sound signals, with "hatching calls" eliciting care by the mother and synchronizing clutch hatching, "contact calls"...
A device for acoustically scaring avian species includes means for emitting an acoustic sequence including the repetition of a combination of at least three categories of different synthetic signals, including warning signals representative of alert noises from birds of prey, interspecies distress signals, and taking-flight signals from various spe...
In breeding birds, acoustic signalling is often an important cue for reunion between sexual partners. However, in spite of its potential interest, mate recognition has rarely been examined by comparing the two sexes. We studied the blue-footed booby, Sula nebouxii, a socially monogamous seabird, with a dramatic call sexual dimorphism suggesting two...
In the Crocodylia order, all species are known for their ability to produce sounds in several communication contexts. Though recent experimental studies have brought evidence of the important biological role of young crocodilian calls, especially at hatching time, the juvenile vocal repertoire still needs to be clarified in order to describe thorou...
In birds, species identity is one of the most important messages conveyed by vocalizations and is the basis for effective acoustic communication between conspecifics. Acoustic analyses can reveal which acoustic cues signal species identity, that is, the cues that could potentially be used by birds for species recognition, whereas playback experimen...
Background: Vocal performance refers to the ability to produce vocal signals close to physical limits. Such motor skills can be used by conspecifics to assess a signaler's competitive potential. For example it is difficult for birds to produce repeated syllables both rapidly and with a broad frequency bandwidth. Deviation from an upper-bound regres...
Song discrimination and recognition in songbird species have usually been studied by measuring responses to song playbacks. In female canaries, Serinus canaria, copulation solicitation displays (CSDs) are used as an index of female preferences, which are related to song recognition. Despite the fact that many studies underline the role of song synt...
Social interactions in mice are frequently analysed in genetically modified strains in order to get insight of disorders affecting social interactions such as autism spectrum disorders. Different types of social interactions have been described, mostly between females and pups, and between adult males and females. However, we recently showed that s...
Details of statistical results for group effects and for paired comparisons of call duration for each call types in the five different conditions.
(DOCX)
Details of statistical results for group effects and for paired comparisons of total number of calls for each call types in the five different conditions.
(DOCX)
Details of peak frequency (min, max, start and end) for each call. Representation of the four peak frequencies for each calls types in the five different conditions.
(EPS)
Details of statistical results for group effects and for paired comparisons in each peak frequency in the five different conditions.
(DOCX)
1. Needs for non-invasive methods to identify and locate animals Population assessment and a proper understanding of behavioural strate-gies are central and urgent tasks in conservation biology. Nevertheless, up to now, field-based biological researches are held back by the difficulty, cost and intrusiveness of marking and tagging animals, and the...
In spite of the importance of crocodilian vocalizations for the understanding of the evolution of sound communication in Archosauria and due to the small number of experimental investigations, information concerning the vocal world of crocodilians is limited. By studying black caimans Melanosuchus niger in their natural habitat, here we supply the...