Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches

Many animals live in a communication network, an environment where individuals can obtain information about competitors or potential mates by observing interactions between conspecifics. In such an environment, interactants might benefit by changing their signalling behaviour in the presence of an a...

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Main Authors:	Ung, Davy, Amy, Mathieu, Leboucher, Gérard
Format:	Online
Language:	English
Published:	Public Library of Science 2011
Online Access:	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3153460/

id	pubmed-3153460
recordtype	oai_dc
spelling	pubmed-31534602011-08-19 Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches Ung, Davy Amy, Mathieu Leboucher, Gérard Research Article Many animals live in a communication network, an environment where individuals can obtain information about competitors or potential mates by observing interactions between conspecifics. In such an environment, interactants might benefit by changing their signalling behaviour in the presence of an audience. This audience effect seems widespread among species, has been observed during various types of interaction (e.g. intra-sexual vs. inter-sexual interaction) and varies according to the social context (e.g. gender, hierarchical or mating status of the audience). However, the way individuals might adapt their signalling behaviour to a combination of these factors remains poorly understood. To address this question, we studied how the presence of an audience affects the behaviour of male domestic canaries Serinus canaria during two types of interactions: (i) an extra-pair interaction and (ii) a male-male competition for food. Males were observed under three conditions: (a) in the absence of audience, (b) in the presence of their mate or (c) of a familiar female. Our results show that male domestic canaries minutely adapt their courting and agonistic behaviours to a combination of: (i) the type of interaction (extra-pair interaction/male-male competition), (ii) the social context (mate, familiar female or nobody in audience) and (iii) the behaviours of both the audience and the interactant. These results highlight the ability of animals to subtly adapt their behaviour to the social environment. This also raises questions about the cognitive foundations and evolution of these processes especially considering that canaries are known neither for having high cognitive abilities nor for being a typical example for the social intelligence hypothesis. Public Library of Science 2011-08-09 /pmc/articles/PMC3153460/ /pubmed/21857945 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0022686 Text en Ung et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type	Open Access Journal
institution_category	Foreign Institution
institution	US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building	NCBI PubMed
collection	Online Access
language	English
format	Online
author	Ung, Davy Amy, Mathieu Leboucher, Gérard
spellingShingle	Ung, Davy Amy, Mathieu Leboucher, Gérard Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches
author_facet	Ung, Davy Amy, Mathieu Leboucher, Gérard
author_sort	Ung, Davy
title	Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches
title_short	Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches
title_full	Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches
title_fullStr	Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches
title_full_unstemmed	Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches
title_sort	heaven it's my wife! male canaries conceal extra-pair courtships but increase aggressions when their mate watches
description	Many animals live in a communication network, an environment where individuals can obtain information about competitors or potential mates by observing interactions between conspecifics. In such an environment, interactants might benefit by changing their signalling behaviour in the presence of an audience. This audience effect seems widespread among species, has been observed during various types of interaction (e.g. intra-sexual vs. inter-sexual interaction) and varies according to the social context (e.g. gender, hierarchical or mating status of the audience). However, the way individuals might adapt their signalling behaviour to a combination of these factors remains poorly understood. To address this question, we studied how the presence of an audience affects the behaviour of male domestic canaries Serinus canaria during two types of interactions: (i) an extra-pair interaction and (ii) a male-male competition for food. Males were observed under three conditions: (a) in the absence of audience, (b) in the presence of their mate or (c) of a familiar female. Our results show that male domestic canaries minutely adapt their courting and agonistic behaviours to a combination of: (i) the type of interaction (extra-pair interaction/male-male competition), (ii) the social context (mate, familiar female or nobody in audience) and (iii) the behaviours of both the audience and the interactant. These results highlight the ability of animals to subtly adapt their behaviour to the social environment. This also raises questions about the cognitive foundations and evolution of these processes especially considering that canaries are known neither for having high cognitive abilities nor for being a typical example for the social intelligence hypothesis.
publisher	Public Library of Science
publishDate	2011
url	https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3153460/
_version_	1611470154278895616

Heaven It's My Wife! Male Canaries Conceal Extra-Pair Courtships but Increase Aggressions When Their Mate Watches

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