Are bird species that vocalize at higher frequencies preadapted to inhabit noisy urban areas?

Foraging choice and replacement reproductives facilitate invasiveness in drywood termites

“…For other gammarid amphipods, Piscart et al (2009) found that an invasive species was more cannibalistic than a native one in Ireland, and Orav-Kotta et al (2009) found that an invasive species ate more than a native one in Estonia. Other variations in behaviors have been found for invasive species, including: pollen foraging in honeybees (Fewell and Bertram 2002); nest location for ants (Suarez et al 2005) and range in behavioral flexibility (Sol et al 2002;Martin and Fitzgerald 2005), flight distance in birds (Møller 2008); vocalization in birds (Hu and Cardoso 2009) and boldness in geckos (Short and Petren 2008). These studies suggest that aggression or boldness is a common character trait in invasive species compared with their non-invasive congeneric species, and perhaps the rate at which immature Cryptotermes mature into neotenic reproductives could be considered a form of assertive or aggressive behavior, which the native species lacked.…”

Habitat urbanization and its effects on birds

“…masked less by urban noise) supposed to be in selective advantage compared to species with lowerfrequency songs, proposing the idea that the former could be preadapted to inhabit urban environments. This hypothesis has gained some support from within-genera comparisons in more than a hundred avian genera (Hu & Cardoso 2009) outlining the role that noise pollution may play in the success or failure of certain species in urban environments. However, it seems that at least some bird species are able to compensate for elevated noise levels by altering their singing characteristics e.g.…”

Can human disturbance promote nestedness? Songbirds and noise in urban parks as a case study

“…This conclusion calls for an explanation, since it was unexpected taking into consideration habitat-dependent sound transmission and degradation properties (Barker, 2008;Wiley, 2009). Because of greater absorption, reverberation and multiple scattering in wooded habitats, songbird species living in forest habitats often use lower frequencies than do those inhabiting more open and sub-open habitats (Barker, 2008;Wiley, 2009 noise occurs at relatively low frequencies, the potential for acoustic masking is higher for birds singing at low frequencies (Hu & Cardoso, 2009;Rheindt, 2003;Wood & Yezerinac, 2006). Therefore, if we assume that our set of forest birds also sing at low frequencies (A.A. Ríos-Chelén, personal communication, 2010), then adverse noise effects should be higher for this group of species, which is contrary to our results.…”