László Zsolt Garamszegi, MTA Centre for Ecological Research, Vácrátót, Hungary: Females as unsung heroines in the evolution of birdsong

The conventional framework for the study of bird song is that males do the singing and females do the listening. Underthis scheme, sex-specific roles in signalling typically involve the advertisement of male quality on one hand, and femalechoice based on song content on the other. Although many studies proved that male attributes correlate with songperformance, the link between superior songs and mating success remains elusive. One potential explanation for thelack of a general applicability of the classical concept is that females’ role in the acoustic communication mediating thefunction and evolution of song is overly simplified therein. Accordingly, using field data from a European passerinespecies I will demonstrate how female quality can shape the song output of a male via within-individual plasticity andhow patterns of assortative/disassortative matings can rearrange rules for female choice. Moreover, relying on comparativedata from a large number of species, I will also show how sharpened competition for males can favour advertisementsongs in females in an evolutionary time scale.