[CS] Public Talk, Feb. 16th, 3:30 pm, ASH 111

[Jean Fournier]

Public Talk
Paige Warren
Candidate for Assistant Professor of Evolution & Cognition

Thursday, February 16th, 3:30 pm, ASH 111

 From song dialects to traffic noise: sources of variation in animal 
communication systems

Animal sounds perform many functions including attracting mates, 
defending territories, and facilitating group cohesion. Species vary in 
space and time in the characteristics of these signals. My research 
addresses three major questions: By what mechanisms do individuals 
recognize the calls of conspecifics? What factors lead to variation in 
space and time?  What are the impacts of humans on animal communication 
systems? To address the first two questions, I will present work on a 
single species, the bronzed cowbird (Molothrus aeneus). This species 
exhibits song dialects, a form of discrete geographic variation. Male 
bronzed cowbirds discriminate among dialects regardless of their 
distance from the population from which the songs are drawn, suggesting 
that experience or familiarity is not the sole mechanism for 
discrimination. For the third question, human impacts, I will present 
new and developing work on urban bioacoustics. Humans, particularly in 
cities, profoundly alter the acoustic structure of their environment. 
Elevated noise levels from traffic have known impacts on animal signals. 
In Phoenix, Arizona, I have found that noise levels vary in predictable 
ways across the urban matrix.  Urbanization, thus, provides a fruitful 
area for future research on the evolution of animal communication 
systems, one that has implications for conservation in human-altered 
environments as well as opportunities to engage students in research.

Paige Warren is currently a Research Assistant Professor in the 
Department of Natural Resources Conservation at University of 
Massachusetts-Amherst. She completed her doctoral degree in 2000 from 
the Department of Integrative Biology at University of Texas at Austin. 
Her graduate research focused on animal communication and the role of 
song learning in species recognition. During her postdoctoral work at 
Arizona State University (2000-2001), she began to examine the effects 
of humans on species distributions in urban areas. As research faculty 
at Virginia Tech (2001-2004), Dr. Warren continued to develop research 
in the area of urban evolutionary ecology, working closely with two 
urban Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) sites in Phoenix, AZ and 
Baltimore, MD. Since arriving at UMass-Amherst in 2004, she has 
developed a local project involving both graduate and undergraduate 
students that focuses on foraging behavior and habitat use in 
cavity-nesting birds. Plans for future research include comparative 
studies of urban bioacoustics in rapidly suburbanizing western 
Massachusetts and at the two urban LTERs, Baltimore and Phoenix.


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Jean Fournier
Administrative Assistant 
School of Cognitive Science
Hampshire College
Adele Simmons Hall
Amherst, MA 01002
413-559-5502
413-559-5438 fax