Intralocus sexual conflicts in bird song
While I share an interest in all aspects of ecology, I am predominantly drawn to the evolutionary process of sexually antagonistic selection. The study species for my MSc thesis is the Great Reed Warbler Acrocephalus arundinaceus, for which long-term data is available. My thesis deals with intralocus sexual conflicts in the song of Great Reed Warblers. The goals of my thesis are three:
- Firstly, I aim to test the reliability of a computer program to analyse the song of Great Reed Warblers.
- Secondly, I intend to describe the geographical component of song variation in Great Reed Warblers using the program.
- Finally, I will explore the size repertoire and different aspects of song in a Swedish population of Great Reed Warblers in terms of its heredity, its genetic correlation between the sexes, and the sexual conflict that it may generate.
Already through my thesis, I have helped to the creation of a new computer program which has for goal the analysis and comparison of song repertoire size within and between recordings. The program automatically separates each syllable, determines its ambiguity domain and its time-frequency domain (see the figure) and compares them to previously chosen reference syllables in order to help in the determination of song repertoire size.
Page Manager: Martin Stervander
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Publisher: Department of Biology
Last modified 4 Dec 2012
