Animals use honest signals to assess the quality of competitors during aggressive interactions. Current theory predicts that honest signals should be costly to produce and thus reveal some aspects of the phenotypic or genetic quality of the sender. In songbirds, research indicates that biomechanical constraints make the production of some acoustic features costly.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe studied ocellated antbirds (Phaenostictus mcleannani) to test the hypothesis that reciprocal tolerance between dominant individuals can favour feeding in aggregations. Mated pairs hold large non-exclusive feeding ranges, but roost and nest in a small portion of this range ('roosting area'); adjacent roosting neighbours are unrelated. Ocellated antbirds congregate to feed on arthropods fleeing from nomadic swarms of army ants that move across the ranges of many pairs.
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