Songs in the understory and colors in the canopy: habitat structure leads to different avian communication strategies in a tropical montane forest

Abstract Birds inhabit a variety of habitats and they communicate using primarily visual and acoustic signals; two central hypotheses have been postulated to study the evolution of such a signals. The sensory drive hypothesis posits that variation in the physical properties of habitats leads to variation in natural selection pressures by affecting the ease with which different types of signals are perceived. Assuming that resources are limited for animals, the transfer hypothesis predicts a negative relationship between the investments in different types of signals. We evaluated these two hypotheses in a tropical montane forest bird assemblage. We also postulate a possible interaction between these two hypotheses: we predicted that the negative relationships between signals should be observed only when jointly considering birds from different environments (e.g. understory and canopy) due to the expected differences in communication strategies between habitats. The sensory drive hypothesis was supported by the differences we found between strata in vocal output, patch contrast to background and color conspicuousness, but not for the variables associated to song elaboration and hue disparity. We found support for the transfer hypothesis: birds with colors contrasting less against the background sing more frequently and birds with lower diversity of colors produce longer songs, understory birds showed also a negative relationship between signals, but only when accounting for phylogeny. We found partial support for the interaction between the sensory drive and the transfer hypotheses: hue disparity and vocal output were negatively related only when analyzing together birds from the canopy and the understory, but not when analyzing them separately. We conclude that the study of the evolution of communication signals needs to consider more than one channel and the functional interactions between them. The results of the interaction of optimal signaling strategies in two communication channels in the local habitats where animals signaling, are the patterns of colors and songs we revealed in a tropical montane forest bird assemblage.