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The metabolic cost of birdsong production

Kerstin Oberweger^* and Franz Goller

Department of Biology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA
^* Present address: Institut für Zoologie, Technikerstraße, 6020 Innsbruck, Austria

View larger version (26K): [in a new window]   Fig. 1. Song bouts in zebra finches led to a distinct increase in the rate of oxygen consumption (O2). Song is shown as an oscillogram in the bottom panel. The segment indicated by the grey horizontal bar in the bottom panel is also shown spectrographically in the top panel. The central panel shows the rate of oxygen consumption, and the vertical bars illustrate the delay between the onset of song and the increase in the rate of oxygen consumption. Horizontal bars indicate the approximate level of pre-song metabolic rate.

View larger version (17K): [in a new window]   Fig. 2. (A) The volume of oxygen consumed (V) increases with increasing duration (D) of song bouts (regression equation: V=0.00069+0.00155D; r=0.82; F=125.9; P<0.001). (B) The average cost of singing a song motif (avgO2 during song minus avgO2 before song) remains constant for the range of bout duration. Although the slopes of individual linear regressions are slightly positive for all four individuals, they are not significantly different from zero (t-tests on whether the slopes are different from zero yielded P-values of 0.336, 0.21, 0.42 and 0.11 for the four individuals). (C) The silent periods between motifs in a song bout do not explain much of the variance in A. Residuals from A (O2 volumes x song duration) are plotted over the difference between bout duration and song duration (i.e. the silent periods between song motifs). The regression is not significant (F=2.53; P=0.117), and the slope is not significantly different from zero (t=1.59; P=0.1172). In all three plots, different symbols indicate data contributed by the four individuals.

View larger version (18K): [in a new window]   Fig. 3. Example of oxygen measurements during song from a canary. Song is shown as oscillogram (bottom panel). The segment indicated by the grey horizontal bar in this panel is also shown spectrographically in the top panel. The rate of oxygen consumption (O2) is shown in the central panel. Note that the peak in oxygen consumption at the end of the song bout (indicated by an arrowhead) was caused by movement of the bird in the respirometry chamber.

View larger version (19K): [in a new window]   Fig. 4. Example of oxygen measurements during song by a starling in the large respirometry chamber. The rise in the rate of oxygen consumption (O2) (central panel) is slow after the onset of song (indicated as oscillogram in the bottom panel). A segment of song (grey horizontal bar) is also shown spectrographically (top panel).

View larger version (17K): [in a new window]   Fig. 5. Example of oxygen measurement during song by a starling in the small respirometry chamber illustrating the difference in the rate of oxygen consumption (O2) between soft and loud song. Song is illustrated as an oscillogram (bottom panel), and two segments (horizontal grey bar) are also shown spectrographically (top panel). Note the more rapid response of the oxygen measurements (vertical line) than in the large respirometry chamber (see Fig. 4), as exemplified at the onset of the loud portion of song.