The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Eben B. Goodale to work with Dr. Sarath W. Kotagama at the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka. Funds to support this project come from the Africa, Near East, South Asia (ANESA) Program.
Mimicry is an important part of the learning process, for humans and for other animals. A few animals are able to imitate other species contextually; the process is analogous to how humans can learn another language in that these animals are able to learn the signals of another species and use these signals in the correct contexts. This ability has been demonstrated most in the laboratory, where whales, primates and parrots have been shown to be able to contextually imitate signals developed by humans. The PI studies a bird that is a member of the drongo family, where the natural function of contextual mimicry is clear: these drongos spend much of their lives in the Sri Lankan rainforest associating with other species in mixed-species bird flocks. Drongos incorporate the alarm vocalizations of other species into their own alarms, and the songs of other species into their own songs, and their mimicry directly influences the behavior of the species with which they interact. Goodale is now further investigating avian contextual mimicry at three levels: developmental, cognitive, and functional. At the developmental level, he is interested in understanding how drongos learn alarm calls, which are for many species of animals not modified by experience. He is raising young drongos in the laboratory in Colombo, Sri Lanka, with different sets of conspecific and heterospecific tutors, and comparing the development of their mimicry to the development of their own species-specific vocalizations. At the cognitive level, Dr. Goodale hopes to determine whether drongos are directing their mimicry to individuals of other species in order to produce a result, a change in the other species' behavior. Adult drongos will be studied in aviaries near the Sri Lankan rainforest in different sets of conspecifics and heterospecifics to see if there is an 'audience effect' on their mimicry. At the functional level, Goodale is traveling to Papua, New Guinea to investigate a mixed-species flock system there, in which several species, including a drongo, have been described to vocally mimic each other, and also have been found to contain toxic compounds. Goodale will test the hypothesis that mimicry functions to increase the proximity of the calling birds to toxic species that predators avoid.
