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Project properties |
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| Title | Animal Communication: The ecology of acoustic communication |
| Group | Behavioural Ecology |
| Project type | thesis |
| Credits | 12-36 |
| Supervisor(s) | Hugo Loning; Marc Naguib |
| Examiner(s) | Marc Naguib |
| Contact info | hugo.loning@wur.nl; marc.naguib@wur.nl |
| Begin date | 2017/11/01 |
| End date | |
| Description | Animal signals underly selection by the acoustic properties of the environment in which they are used to communicate. During transmission signals degrade and attenuate so that a distant receiver will make its decision based on a signal which has accumulated changes during propagation, often over more than 100m, the communication distance in many songbirds.
This project can be (1) experimental by broadcasting and re-recording sounds in different habitat and across different distances to determine which sound structures transmit best and link this to signal function. (2) comparative by downloading sound files from archives like xeno-canto.org/eBird/the Tierstimmenarchiv at the Natural History Museum in Berlin, to determine if and how bird sounds differ across species living in different habitats, ranging from open fields to dense forests. |
| Used skills | |
| Requirements | BSc thesis: Animal Behaviour BHE20303, MSc thesis: Behavioural Ecology BHE30306 |