Snakes: Predators of Broods of Oriental Tits (IMAGE)

Laboratory of Behavioral Ecology and Evolution at Seoul National University

Snakes: Predators of Broods of Oriental Tits

Caption

Figure 1. (A) - A snake (the steppe rat snake, Elaphe dione) found inside of a nest box on top of the nest of the Oriental tit after it ate the nestlings that were in the nest; (B) - a model of a snake on top of a nest box was moved in a naturalistic manner using fishing line from a distance in order to trigger alarm calls in the birds. These tests lasted just a few minutes, they did not cause any harm to the birds, and the recordings of bird responses showed that alarm calls to snakes have special acoustic properties (Audio recording of response to a snake.mp3) different from calls to chipmunks (Audio recording of response to a chipmunk.mp3), who also can enter the nest boxes and eat broods. This suggests that the calls do not carry information about predator's ability to enter the nest cavity.

Credit

Jungmoon Ha, Keesan Lee, Eunjeong Yang, Woojoo Kim, Ho?kyung Song, Injae Hwang, Larisa Lee?Cruz, Sang?im Lee, Piotr Jablonski

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