Robots and sensor technology are becoming important tools for studying bird behavior, according to a UC Davis researcher. Gail Patricelli, assistant professor of evolution and ecology, presented an overview of her work Feb. 13 during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago.

Patricelli studies the complex social interactions between male and female birds in order to learn how sexual selection might favor not just physical traits, but social skills. Her use of hand-built robotic animals and microphone arrays in the field has yielded a trove of information about sexual selection, particularly the role that females play in guiding courtship performances.

Highlights of Patricelli’s talk included:

• Satin bowerbird. Patricelli led a team that designed and built a robotic female satin bowerbird and programmed it to display various behaviors. Working in the bird’s natural habitat in Australia, she remotely manipulated the “fembot” to respond in various manners to a male’s courtship display. She found that males adjusted the intensity of their display based on signals from the female, and that males that were the most responsive to the signals succeeded in mating more often than their less responsive rivals.
• Greater sage-grouse. Patricelli designed a greater sage-grouse fembot to ride atop the flatbed car of a model train set that she erected on a sage-grouse courting grounds — a lek — in Wyoming. By equipping her construction with a microphone and video camera, she was able to view and record the male’s display from the perspective of the receiving female.
• Directionality of acoustic communication in songbirds. Very little is known about how animals target or direct their acoustic communication. Due to the difficulty of measuring the volume and direction of a sound in the field, few researchers have succeeded in learning much about this important aspect of communication. In collaboration with colleagues at the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Patricelli has developed a system for recording and analyzing directionality of acoustic communication among perching songbirds. In a study of red-winged blackbirds in New York, Patricelli and colleagues found that the directionality of the calls of territorial males varied dramatically depending on the type of call, and that calls that might prove costly to a male if they were overheard by rivals or predators were the ones that had the narrowest range of directionality. According to Patricelli, this acoustic recording system can be adapted to study many other bird species as well as insects, frogs and mammals.

Patricelli’s Web site contains information about her work and links to a number of her papers: http://www.eve.ucdavis.edu/gpatricelli/.