How birds learn that specific sounds are cues of a threat, such as predator vocalizations or heterospecific alarm calls? A new study led by Jakub Szymkowiak and published in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology reveals that birds can learn to recognize novel, previously unfamiliar sounds (samples of punk rock songs) as acoustic risk cues socially, by associating them with conspecific alarm calls. Moreover, social learning is threat-sensitive, with naïve individuals acquiring anti-predator responses to novel sounds depending on the strength of the anti-predator responses of conspecifics to these sounds.
The study provides experimental evidence that even though during the breeding season individual birds occupy distinct territories that are spaced apart each other, they are still inter-connected via information sharing and, at the population level, form a kind of “information network”. In such networks, novel anti-predator responses can be socially acquired and transmitted among the individuals across territory borders. Under natural conditions, the threat-sensitive social transmission likely allows individuals to minimize the costs of incorrectly associating neutral sounds as cues of a threat when learning via indirect risk cues.
Such social transmission of risk recognition among territorial conspecifics can have important eco-evolutionary consequences. Traditionally, co-occurring conspecifics have been considered as putative competitors and the negative impacts of competitive interactions on individuals’ fitness and higher order ecological phenomena have been emphasized. However, the results of this study show that apart from being competitors, conspecifics are also the repositories of vital, fitness-enhancing information, which they can transfer to other individuals.
Read the full paper here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00265-026-03751-3