American tanagers’ colours and songs, new study

This video is called Colombia Tanagers [various species].

From Wildlife Extra:

Study dispels Darwin’s theory to prove birds can have it all

Despite popular belief birds can have a brilliant plumage, a virtuosic singing chirp and an intricate dance routine say scientists.

The author of a new study, Nick Mason, from the the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in New York state, challenged the long-held notion, first proposed by Charles Darwin, that for a bird species to excel in one area it must give up its edge in another.

For example, male northern cardinals are a dazzling scarlet, but sing a fairly simple whistle, whereas the dull brown House Wren sings one of the most complicated songs in nature.

Mason and his colleagues tested the theory by examining a very large family of songbirds from Central and South America, the tanagers.

This group consists of 371 species and included some of the most spectacularly colourful birds in the world such as the paradise tanager as well as the more drab birds, such the black-bellied seedeater. The group also includes both accomplished and weak songsters alike.

“If there were going to be any group of birds at all that would show this trade-off, the tanagers would be a very good candidate, because there’s all this variation in song and plumage complexity,” Mason said.

“But when we dived into it and did some rigorous statistics, it turns out that there is no overall trend. Tanagers can be drab and plain-sounding, or colourful and musical, or or anything in between.”

It’s still possible that trade-offs take place at the level of genus, Mason said, or that they influence species relatively fleetingly as evolutionary pressures appear and disappear.

But as a broad effect on an entire family of birds, a voice–plumage trade off doesn’t seem to exist. One possibility is that the resources needed to develop fancy plumage are different from the ones required for complex songs, freeing tanagers to invest in both forms of showiness simultaneously.