Vocal communication is central to the lives of many birds, which use sound to attract mates and defend territories.
Penguins are no exception, but we know little about how or why penguin vocalizations vary geographically between isolated populations. A new study from The Auk: Ornithological Advances takes a broad look at vocalizations across the range of Gentoo Penguins and concludes that while their calls do vary from place to place, we still have a lot to learn about the processes at work.
The Gentoo Penguin’s “ecstatic” call, consisting of repeated pairs of short syllables, is used to attract and contact mates. Maureen Lynch and her PhD advisor Dr. Heather Lynch (no relation) of Stony Brook University recorded ecstatic calls at 22 Gentoo Penguin colonies across the Antarctic Peninsula, southern Argentina, and nearby islands. While they found variation in call frequency and duration both within and between colonies, no clear patterns emerged based on latitude, region, or subspecies. An algorithm based on their data was able to classify calls to correct colonies better than random, but with a high error rate.
Their results suggest that the vocal characteristics of colonies drift independently of each other over time.
Continue reading at American Ornithological Society Publications Office
Image via M. Lynch
