Wednesday 17:15-18:15
Plenary Session: Birdsong dialects: engines of speciation, epiphenomena, or something in between?
Beth MacDougall-Shackleton
Vocal learning makes humans unusual, but not unique, among animals. In the songbirds, males and
females learn song during early life, frequently resulting in discontinuous geographic variation known as
song dialects. The origin, maintenance and evolutionary importance of song dialects represents a
longstanding problem in biology, with implications for the role of culture in the ecology and evolution of
diverse species including our own. I will discuss recent work aimed at testing the hypothesis that
birdsong dialects tend to isolate populations, and ultimately, to accelerate rates of speciation. I also
present evidence that individuals vary substantially in the degree to which they advertise their
population of origin, and speculate as to why this might occur.