—The natural histories of Volcano (Selasphorus flammula) and Scintillant (S. scintilla) hummingbirds are poorly known. We describe aspects of their breeding behavior with emphasis on courtship displays and sounds that males produced for females. Males of neither species sang undirected song. Males of both species produced a display dive, in which they ascended ,25 m in the air and then dove, sw...

The courtship song of the cricket, Teleogryllus oceanicus plays an important role in inducing the female to mount the male, which is necessary for mating. The song consists of a short, amplitude-modulated chirp, followed by a long trill of constant intensity and high syllable rate. Using playback techniques, it was determined which physical parameters of courtship song are necessary and/or suff...

—Songs of individual male Blue Grosbeaks (Passerina caerulea) typically begin with the same combination of elements, but the sequence and number of elements in the latter portion of songs vary. We examined the possible functions of within-song variation in Blue Grosbeaks at the Blue Grass Army Depot near Richmond, Kentucky, USA from 15 April to 31 July 2007. We examined singing rates and song c...

The seven papers in this special edition are derived from the 2nd Workshop on Sound Change held at Kloster Seeon, Germany, in May 2012. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together scientists approaching the question of sound change and its relationship to synchronic variation in speech from many different disciplinary perspectives that we believe are necessary for understanding this compl...

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are synthetic chemical pollutants with demonstrated detrimental toxic and developmental effects on humans and wildlife. Laboratory studies suggest that PCBs influence behavior due to their effects on endocrine and neurological systems, yet little is known about the behavioral consequences of sublethal PCB exposure in the field. Additionally, specific PCB congene...

The songs of many insects exhibit precise timing as the result of repetitive and stereotyped subunits on several time scales. As these signals encode the identity of a species, time and timing are important for the recognition system that analyzes these signals. Crickets are a prominent example as their songs are built from sound pulses that are broadcast in a long trill or as a chirped song. T...

One difficulty in the physical observation of articulatory structures in the pharynx is the reliability of measurements for comparative purposes. The objective of the present approach is to review and explore techniques of identifying and measuring degrees of adjustment of the pharyngeal articulatory mechanism in the production of auditorily controlled settings. Anatomical landmarks are identif...

Shortest path bridging overcomes the limitations of the spanning tree protocol in switched networks. Dominant approaches like Shortest Path Bridges (IEEE 802.1aq) and TRILL (IETF) Rbridges add a link state routing protocol in layer two to compute shortest paths between bridges, but these paths are shared by multiple hosts. Balancing the load at links requires complex equal cost multipath comput...

Please cite this article in press as: Podos, Behaviour (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ Kroodsma (2017, Animal Behaviour, 125, e1ee16) has critiqued ‘the performance hypothesis’, which posits that two song attributes, trill rate and frequency bandwidth, provide reliable indicators of singer quality and are used as such in mate or rival assessment. Kroodsma develops three main arguments: (1) y...

We present the Tamajaq language and the dictionary we used as main linguistic resource in the two first parts. The third part details the complex morphology of this language. In the part 4 we describe the conversion of the dictionary into electronic form, the inflectional rules we wrote and their implementation in the Nooj software. Finally we present a plan for our future work. 1. The Tamajaq ...