Songs, speciation, and sparrows

Postdoc Dave Toews provides some perspective in a “News and Views” article in the journal Molecular Ecology on new behavioral research in the white-throated sparrow conducgted by Sara Lipshutz (in Elizabeth Derryberry’s lab at Tulane), which compared bioacoustic variation across a contact zone between two white-throated sparrow subspecies. White-throated sparrows are well-known for song variation over small spatial scales and Dave uses the new research as a springboard to discuss the evolutionary consequences of song variation across multiple scales. Read the paper online here: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/mec.14104/full