PhD Studentship: Corvids calling: understanding the origins of complex communication. BBSRC SWBio DTP PhD studentship 2025 Entry

About:

The BBSRC-funded SWBio DTP involves a partnership of world-renown universities, research institutes and industry, based mainly across the South West and Wales.

This partnership has established international, national and regional scientific networks, and widely recognised research excellence and facilities.

We aim to provide you with outstanding interdisciplinary bioscience research training, underpinned by transformative technologies.

Project Description

Animals have diverse acoustic communication systems, from the chirping of crickets to the almost infinite complexity of human language, and these systems play a vital role in enabling cooperation and structuring societies. Most attempts to understand the causes of this variation use between-species comparisons. These have examined, for instance, whether social or ecological variables predict characteristics of communication systems, such as whether vocalisations are individually distinctive, or the number of different vocalisations used. However, these comparative, correlational approaches tell us little about the benefits individuals derive from communication and ignore the possibility that benefits vary across different contexts.

An alternative, more powerful approach is to harness within-species variation to understand how and why individuals use different signals to solve diverse challenges. Jackdaws, birds of the large-brained corvid family, provide an ideal system as they live in highly variable social environments, some of their calls are known to be individually distinctive, and they use vocalisations to solve diverse problems. Jackdaw societies centre around long-term, monogamous pairbonds, but pairs are embedded in dynamic social networks within breeding colonies and members of different colonies forage together and form vast winter flocks numbering thousands of individuals. Our established study sites contain thousands of individually recognisable, PIT-tagged jackdaws, providing unique opportunities to understand the development and function of vocal communication across these diverse contexts.

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