Calling rhythm as a predictor of the outcome of vocal interactions: flight departure in pale-winged starling pairs.

Vocal communication plays an important role in the regulation of social interactions and the coordination of activities in many animal species. Synchrony is an essential part of the establishment and maintenance of pair bonds, but few reports have investigated decision-making at the pair level. We investigated temporal characteristics of call exchanges in pale-winged starlings (Onychognathus nabouroup) that could predict whether one, two, or neither members of a pair would take off.

Corrigendum: Social coordination in animal vocal interactions. Is there any evidence of turn-taking? The starling as an animal model.

[This corrects the article on p. 1416 in vol. 6, PMID: 26441787.

Social coordination in animal vocal interactions. Is there any evidence of turn-taking? The starling as an animal model.

Turn-taking in conversation appears to be a common feature in various human cultures and this universality raises questions about its biological basis and evolutionary trajectory. Functional convergence is a widespread phenomenon in evolution, revealing sometimes striking functional similarities between very distant species even though the mechanisms involved may be different. Studies on mammals (including non-human primates) and bird species with different levels of social coordination reveal that temporal and structural regularities in vocal interactions may depend on the species' social structure.

Sexing Adult Pale-Winged Starlings Using Morphometric and Discriminant Function Analysis.

Accurate sexing of birds is vital for behavioral studies but can be a real problem in the field, especially for monomorphic species. Our goal here was to characterize the morphology of male and female monomorphic pale-winged starlings (Onychognathus nabouroup), a South African sturnid whose plumage is sexually monomorphic. Morphological measurements of genetically sexed animals indicated that males were statistically larger than females for five measurements: Mass, tail length, tarsus length and wing length.