Contrasting coloured ventral wings are a visual collision avoidance signal in birds

Abstract

Collisions between fast-moving objects often cause severe damage, but collision avoidance mechanisms of fast-moving animals remain understudied. Particularly, birds can fly fast and often in large groups, raising the question of how individuals avoid in-flight collisions that are potentially lethal. We tested the collision-avoidance hypothesis, which proposes that conspicuously contrasting ventral wings are visual signals that help birds to avoid collisions. We scored the ventral wing contrasts for a global dataset of 1780 bird species. Phylogenetic comparative analyses showed that larger species had more contrasting ventral wings than smaller species, and that in larger species, colonial breeders had more contrasting ventral wings than non-colonial breeders. Evidently, larger species have lower manoeuvrability than smaller species, and colonial-breeding species frequently encounter con- and heterospecifics, increasing their risk of in-flight collisions. Thus, more contrasting ventral wing patterns in these species are a sensory mechanism that facilitates collision avoidance.

Evolution of Avian Eye Size Is Associated with Habitat Openness, Food Type and Brain Size

“…Refs. [95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111] are cited in the Supplementary Materials.…”

Mimicry in motion: A grasshopper species that looks like, and moves like, a sympatric butterfly

“…In some cases, the signal may serve to convey information to conspecifics [5]. Alternatively, the sudden exposure of a previously hidden conspicuous signal may startle a predator on deployment, buying time for the signaller to escape [3,6].…”