Urban noise undermines female sexual preferences for low-frequency songs in domestic canaries

Timing vocal behavior: Lack of temporal overlap avoidance to fluctuating noise levels in singing Eurasian wrens

“…The moderate shift may yield some masking avoidance through a reduction in spectral overlap between bird signal and traffic noise or because higher frequency may be sung at a higher amplitude and thereby improve signal-tonoise ratios (Nemeth and Brumm, 2010;Nemeth et al, 2012Nemeth et al, , 2013. However, the masking noise in our experiment was not biased to low frequencies and, independent of the extent of masking avoidance, it is by no means certain that noise-dependent spectral adjustments are advantageous to the singer (Halfwerk et al, 2011b;Huet des Aunay et al, 2014).…”

Sexy voices – no choices: male song in noise fails to attract females

“…In many species, females are attracted by males using acoustic signals on which females base their mate choice (Andersson, 1994). Anthropogenic noise impairs maleefemale communication (Bee & Swanson 2007;Halfwerk et al, 2011;Huet des Aunay et al, 2014;Samarra, Klappert, Brumm, & Miller, 2009), which may translate to lower reproductive output. Thus, changes in species abundance may derive from negative effects that increasing noise levels may have on an individual's behaviour.…”

Learning to cope: vocal adjustment to urban noise is correlated with prior experience in black-capped chickadees

“…Further, avoiding lower-frequency songs may limit a male's vocal range, and thus make it more difficult to perform well during dynamic pitch shifting interactions [27], which can result in males losing paternity in their nests [59]. Thus, pitch shifting to minimize the effects of masking could result in a functional compromise [55,56], such that masking may be reduced but at the expense of efficient communication with both conspecific females [4,60] and males [61,62].…”