Noise-dependent vocal plasticity in domestic fowl
Section snippets
Animals and Housing
The experiment was conducted at the Institute of Animal Welfare and Animal Husbandry in Celle, Germany. As subjects we used 21 broiler chickens of the strain Ross 308 at an age of 4 weeks. All subjects were reared and kept together in a group of 60 individually marked animals in a litter floor system (3.9 × 3.7 m and 2.6 m high) with straw. In this chicken compartment the birds were maintained on a 12:12 h light:dark schedule, with air temperature ranging between 21 and 23°C (but the local
Results
Subjects significantly increased the sound pressure of their calls in response to an increase in the background noise level (within-subjects effect: F4,72 = 21.5, P < 0.01; linear within-subject contrast: F1,18 = 34.7, P < 0.001; Fig. 3a). On average ±SE, the chickens called at 61 ± 2 dB in ambient noise and at 76 ± 1 dB in maximum background noise.
Call duration, however, was not regulated according to the background noise level, but rather remained stable at values around 150 ms (within-subjects effect: F4,72
Discussion
We investigated noise-induced modulations in chicken calls and found that the birds exhibited the Lombard effect, that is, an increase in vocal amplitude in response to an increase in the background noise level. This finding is in line with earlier studies that showed the Lombard effect in songbirds (Cynx et al., 1998, Brumm and Todt, 2002, Kobayashi and Okanoya, 2003) and also nonsongbirds (Potash, 1972, Manabe et al., 1998). Our findings support the view that the Lombard effect is a general
Acknowledgments
We thank Erwin Nemeth for his help with the data preparation. He and Rachel Page, as well as Valentin Amrhein and two anonymous reviewers, gave helpful comments on the manuscript. Financial support was provided by the German Research Foundation (Emmy Noether fellowship to H.B., award BR 2309/6-1).
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Cited by (0)
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L. Schrader is at the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Institute of Animal Welfare and Animal Husbandry, Dörnbergstr. 25/27, 29223 Celle, Germany.