Cumulative cultural evolution, the accumulation of sequential changes within a single socially learned behaviour that results in improved function, is prominent in humans and has been documented in experimental studies of captive animals and managed wild populations. Here, we provide evidence that cumulative cultural evolution has occurred in the learned songs of Savannah sparrows. In a first step, “click trains” replaced “high note clusters” over a period of three decades. We use mathematical modelling to show that this replacement is consistent with the action of selection, rather than drift or frequency-dependent bias. Generations later, young birds elaborated the “click train” song form by adding more clicks. We show that the new songs with more clicks elicit stronger behavioural responses from both males and females. Therefore, we suggest that a combination of social learning, innovation, and sexual selection favoring a specific discrete trait was followed by directional sexual selection that resulted in naturally occurring cumulative cultural evolution in the songs of this wild animal population.

We study tropically planar graphs, which are the graphs that appear in smooth tropical plane curves. We develop necessary conditions for graphs to be tropically planar, and compute the number of tropically planar graphs up to genus 7. We provide non-trivial upper and lower bounds on the number of tropically planar graphs, and prove that asymptotically 0% of connected trivalent planar graphs are tropically planar.

Given a lattice polygon, we study the moduli space of all tropical plane curves with that Newton polygon. We determine a formula for the dimension of this space in terms of combinatorial properties of that polygon. If this polygon is nonhyperelliptic or maximal and hyperelliptic, then this formula matches the dimension of the moduli space of nondegenerate algebraic curves with the given Newton polygon.