Dave Gammon, professor of biology, presented his research on vocal mimicry at the annual meetings of the Animal Behavior Society in Cincinnati, Ohio
黑料不打烊 Professor of BIology Dave Gammon recently attended the of the in Cincinnati, Ohio. He presented research he began while working in the summer of 2025 with a SURE student, Virginia Campbell 鈥26.
The research project Gammon presented at ABS centers on the evolution of vocal mimicry in the taxonomic family that includes the , , and the . He specifically compared the mimicry of these three species and found that mockingbirds mimic five times as much as the other two species. Counterintuitively, he also found that the diversity of mimicry is similar between the three species.
One of his most intriguing findings is that each mimic species puts its own ‘vocal stamp’ on the sounds of the species they imitate. For example, even though normally repeat their syllable phrases four or five times, catbirds don’t repeat wren phrases at all, thrashers repeat them just twice, and mockingbirds repeat them three or more times. These numerical differences match acoustic differences already found in the nonmimetic sounds of these three mimic species, suggesting that copying models perfectly is less important than following species-specific rules for how to sing.