Elizabeth P. Derryberry

TL;DR: This work investigates how the urban habitat affects the gut microbiome of White-crowned Sparrows using spatial analyses of land cover at the regional level and territory level in urban San Francisco, CA and nearby rural Point Reyes, CA to provide a baseline for future studies of how anthropogenic change affects communities at multiple levels.

TL;DR: It is found that increases in speciation rates in Furnariidae did not coincide with the acquisition of climbing adaptations and that the relationship between the accumulation of climbing adaptation and rates of speciation was negative, which does not support the hypothesis that ecological opportunity related to trunk foraging stimulated cladogenesis in this radiation.

TL;DR: Male white-crowned sparrows responded most strongly to current local songs, less, but equally, to historical local and current non-local songs, and least to songs of the distant population, supporting the idea that behavioural discrimination among learned signals of conspecific populations can evolve relatively rapidly.

TL;DR: A test of the hypothesis that song-learning birds choose to copy songs that are less degraded by transmission through the environment, using swamp sparrows (Melospiza georgiana) as the authors' study species found that all subjects discriminated between undegraded and naturally degraded song models, and learnt only from undEGraded song models.

TL;DR: It is found that noise-tutored males learn less-masked songs significantly more often, whereas control males show no copying preference, providing strong experimental support for cultural selection in response to anthropogenic noise.