Study
Nuthatches eavesdrop on variations in heterospecific chickadee mobbing alarm calls
Templeton, Christopher N.; Greene, Erick
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007
Played wild nuthatches recordings of chickadee mobbing calls that encoded different degrees of threat — chickadee calls vary in structure with how dangerous the predator is — and measured how strongly the nuthatches responded.
- Studied in
- Sitta canadensis, Poecile atricapillus
- Sample size
- playback trials to wild nuthatches
Nuthatches adjusted their mobbing response to match the threat level encoded in the chickadee calls, responding more strongly to calls that chickadees produce for more dangerous predators.
What it means
The authors' reading, and ours. Where they differ, that difference is the point.
How the authors put it
Nuthatches extract graded threat information from another species’ calls, not merely the presence of an alarm.
How NatureHQ reads it
The record showing that alarm information crosses species lines with its detail intact. The nuthatch is not simply reacting to noise; it is reading how alarmed the chickadee is, which makes the local alarm network a shared information system rather than a set of parallel private ones.
- Playback removes the caller and the context, so the response is to sound alone.
- Two species in one community; how widely this level of cross-species reading occurs is not established here.
What this study is used for on NatureHQ
One study can inform several subjects. Here is everywhere this one is cited.
Published by: Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesPublished in PNAS.
doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0605183104
Checked against Crossref on 2026-09-28, and they agree on the title, the authors and the year.
NatureHQ summarises research in its own words and does not reproduce published text. Reviewed 2026-09-03.