Recently I was simply wondering if it’s bad to make an animal call to you by playing an audio recording and having it respond. Is that tinkering with its behavior or will it lead to aggression?
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Some bird calls will affect other birds, especially around breeding and nesting, in both time and place.
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Once when I was a grad student I recorded the call of a male Strawberry Poison Dart Frog (Oophaga pumilio). Then I walked down the trail a bit, sat down where I could hear some calling, and played the call back on my little handheld voice recorder. I did this over and over and noticed another male had stopped calling and hopped up to me, up my leg, onto my arm and actually onto my hand while I kept playing the call. Clearly he was perturbed by having another male in his territory and took some risk to seek out this intruder. Eventually he lost interest and hopped away. So in answer to your question, yes, it clearly altered that animal’s behavior and clearly led to aggression, such as it was. Setting aside the issue of whether it’s ethical to do this, at least for frogs, it’s probably not going to produce long-term effects on that animal. For example, even interacting in controlled situations with another male has been shown to cause a stress response in those males (and females for that matter), at least in lizards where I’m familiar with the literature. However, these elevated levels of stress hormones last for less than a day before returning to ‘normal.’ So, calls probably create something similar…short-term stress response as expected, but not long-term negative impacts. Now if it happened every day of the life of that animal, that would probably be another story, but the occasional interaction….probably not a big deal.
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I would guess that this is very dependant on species, season, and a lot of other factors, such as the type of call (alarm call vs flight call, for example). As a general rule, I would avoid playing animal calls during breeding seasons. I know that with birds, like @Thunderhead said,
I have talked to people who use audio recordings outside of breeding seasons, for example in wintertime, but they do this sparingly.
I have been on guided river canoeing trips where recordings of frogs were used to get frogs to call back. I don’t know the effects on the frogs, other than responses. It did seem to be a regular part of their trips.
I don’t know how bad it is in general, but I have one experience to share where I accidentally caused some aggression to a bird. I’m not interested in birds much normally, but in the winter I walked through the forest and constantly heard high pitched sounds, after a while of searching I figured out it could be Regulus regulus bird. I was just on the Wikipedia page for them and clicked the button to play back a recording of its call on my phone - a moment later a seemingly super angry Regulus landed on a branch right next to my face, maybe 10cm away, and looked at my phone. I was in complete shock and almost dropped the phone, and the bird flew away again. I hope I didn’t cause it too much extra stress, and ever since if I decide to listen to animal calls while out in nature I do so at the lowest possible volume as to not disturb one again.
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I don’t know if it will lead to aggression, but I personally don’t like using playback. It takes the fun and spontaneity out of the whole endeavor, and I’m sure it has at least some effect on the animals and as I get older I care less about doing what ever I can to see a specific species and more about just enjoying being in an area and seeing whatever’s available.
For what it’s worth, last year some friends and I hired a local birding guide in Panama and thankfully he wasn’t into using playback much. He told us that in an area famous for a certain bird, too many people and guides have used playback and the birds basically don’t respond any longer.
If you search “birding ethics playback” you’ll get a lot of articles discussing the issue as well.
Thanks! Overall solid answers! Would anyone know how ethical playback would be with mammals, pets, or domesticated animals?
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They can react with stress, too, because they can recognize individual voices. I give you two personal experiences.
I used to have a dog. I was starting one of those online surveys, and it had an audio component. To test the audio, it first had me verify that I could hear the playback of a dog barking. Not only could I hear it, but my dog came instantly from asleep to full alert.
Another time, I was visitng a family member for the holidays. I was listening to one of those silly “Jingle Cats” CDs, where the songs play using recordings of cats meowing at different pitches. You should have seen the expression on the face of my family member’s cat. It said, “Where did all these strange cats come from?!?”
There are some types of audio that will lead to aggression in Homo sapiens inaturalensis
I was listening to a cd that had bird calls while my cat was sleeping on the chair next to me. When the Great Horned Owl called that cat flew across the room and out the door! He had never heard one in his life, but he knew to run for cover!
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After being on tours that use calls to attract birds, I am confident that a single motorcycle causes more distress to the birds than a pre-recorded bird call. A party by the river is even worse.
But there is nothing more disturbing to a bird than sitting quietly then lifting your camera.
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This is quite interesting. In this case, the playback is a form of cheating, or dishonest signaling, which falls under the category of frequency-dependent selection…natural selection where the frequency of the phenotype determines its fitness. Evolutionary biologists have studied this extensively and generally found empirically and theoretically that the dishonest signals must occur at low frequency in order for the signal to continue to be used. If the signal is dishonest too frequently then it ceases to convey any meaningful information and can be ignored. The frequency of the cheating or dishonest signal that occurs is nature is usually low, around 10-15% of signaling. When the frequency get to be about about, say, 20% the communication breaks down as the receiver stops responding to the signal. In other words, if you’re dealing with a liar that is dishonest more than 20% of the time there is no evolutionary reason to continue believing the information that individual is trying to convey. But if the lie is infrequent enough, then individuals can get away with it. This works because females need honest information to assess mates, males need honest information to assess competitors, and even prey use it to assess the risk of depredation. So, I can completely imagine a scenario where playbacks cause individuals to stop responding to the lie.
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