Ornithologist-to-be in data science, and vice versa. Postdoc-ing at Imperial College London.
Jingyi Yang
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Big thanks to the cool team! 👏 Chiti Arvind, @ra-barber.bsky.social, Oscar Johnson, Katie O'Brien; Richard Stanley, Gustavo Bravo, Evan Buck, @sclaramunt.bsky.social, Robb Brumfield, Mike Harvey, Elizabeth Derryberry, and @josephtobias.bsky.social.
... and is consistently constrained by ecological factors such as habitat density and species morphology.
Happy to see my PhD work on birdsong complexity published today! doi.org/10.1098/rspb... 🐦⬛ 🎶 ⬇️
Why are some birdsongs simple and some extremely complex? The answer is long thought to be ‘sexual selection favouring complex signals’. But - really?
Testing the evolution of song complexity of >1,200 bird species in 6 social and ecological contexts, we found song complexity does NOT increase with sexual selection (more polygynous mating systems), but instead with higher social competition (more territorial behaviours).
Overall, our findings challenge the common assumption of sexual selection driving signal elaboration, and highlight the combination of social, cultural and ecological factors driving birdsong evolution.
