News release

From: The Royal Society

Ontogenetic evidence of socially learned call sequences in Western Australian magpies

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Research into syntactic vocalisations in animals has largely focused on cross-sectional studies of adult individuals, limiting our capacity to uncover the developmental origins and drivers of variation in these vocalisations. Here, we perform the first longitudinal, developmental study of non-song call sequences, revealing that Western Australian magpies learn their sequence repertoires from their social groups—the first evidence of this outside of humans. Furthermore, fledglings that spend more time with others develop their repertoires faster, and those with more social contacts develop larger repertoires. These findings provide the first individual-level and ontogenetic support for combinatoriality being driven by sociability.