Professor of Biology Dave Gammon and his former student Gabi Resh '17 were recently published in the journal Behavior for their research on mimicry.
Mockingbirds are famous for their ability to mock other species, but how does the mocking originate? That was the question Gabi Resh ’17 wanted to answer while doing Honors research at Elon University. Professor of Biology Dave Gammon and Resh recently published this research as part of a peer-reviewed article in the journal Behaviour.
Imagine you were a young mockingbird that recently hatched and was ready to learn new songs. You would hear plenty of songs from the tufted titmouse, but you would also hear those same titmouse songs being imitated by other mockingbirds. If you learn directly from the titmice then Gammon and Resh would call it primary mimicry. If you learned titmouse songs from other mockingbirds, however, it would be called secondary mimicry.
The main value of Gammon and Resh’s article is that it provides an empirical framework that can be used by field biologists to identify secondary mimicry, even when the learning cannot be observed directly. This framework can now get used by scholars studying vocal mimicry in other bird species. Gammon and Resh also provided a variety of evidence that local mockingbirds use secondary mimicry to develop at least a portion of their mimetic songs.
The article can be found at the journal website or on Gammon’s website. If you prefer pretty pictures and tantalizing sounds, you can also watch a 4.5min YouTube video that summarizes the research.