This meeting and presentation took place entirely online via Zoom.
At 7:00 pm, President Debbie Mullins called the Society meeting to order.
President Mullins made the following announcements:
She welcomed all to the first membership meeting of 2025.
She announced that the 147th annual meeting will be held on Tuesday, March 11, at the Liederkranz Club on East 87thStreet. The Eisenmann Medal, the Society’s highest honor, will be presented to Dr. Brian Watts, and he will give the keynote address, Eagles of the Chesapeake.
President Mullins noted that the annual meeting is only open to dues-paying members. Those who have forgotten to pay their fall dues can pay now and will be able to attend the meeting. She also encouraged non-members to join the Society, and come to the meeting, and remarked that the annual meetings are fun. The membership application is on the Linnaean website at linnaeannewyork.org under Members/Join.
There will be a raffle and a silent auction to defray the costs of the meeting. Donations are welcome, either objects, or volunteering to lead an activity such as a guided bird walk.
President Mullins provided an update on the New York State Horseshoe Crab Protection Act. Unfortunately, Governor Hochul vetoed the legislation over concerns about harming the commercial fishing industry in New York. The State Department of Environmental Conservation will continue to monitor and manage the horseshoe crab to protect the species.
President Mullins welcomed the following new Linnaean Society members:
- Michelle Davis
- Victoria Embuscado
- Edward Gaillard
- Madeeha Hanif
- Brad Wells
- Robert Young
- Richard Zeman
At 7:02 pm, President Mullins turned to the lecture program and introduced the speaker, Dr. Liz Derryberry, professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Lecture: “Non-parallel Behavioral Responses to Soundscape Perturbations during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” presented by Dr. Liz Derryberry
Dr. Derryberry did her doctoral work at Duke University on the cultural evolution of songs in White-crowned Sparrows, and she has continued to study this species for the past 25 years. In today’s lecture she described many attributes of the White-crowned Sparrow, including characteristics of its song, how it is a complex behavior (a phenotype), that both males and occasionally females sing, and that males sing for two main reasons: 1) to establish and protect territory; and 2) to attract females as potential mates. She also contrasted the singing of urban populations with rural ones, and described how background noise affects the way birds sing.
Dr. Derryberry explained how birdsong can provide quantitative data to address research questions, including two of particular interest to her: 1) how does the environment affect the evolution of song, and, 2) what are the functional consequences of song evolution? Today’s lecture focused on a subset of these questions by considering the anthropogenic effect of the COVID-19 shutdown on the song of the White-crowned Sparrow.
Following is Dr. Derryberry’s abstract of her talk:
The COVID-19 pandemic triggered unprecedented environmental perturbations—sometimes referred to collectively as the Anthropause—that have progressed rapidly and over broad spatial extents, affording novel quasi-experimental opportunities to measure outcomes of human-environment interactions. Here we evaluate the resilience of a common songbird to noise pollution by comparing soundscapes and songs across the San Francisco Bay Area prior to, during, and after the spring of 2020 statewide shutdown. Restrictions on human movement during the shutdown reduced noise pollution, relaxing auditory pressures on animals that communicate via sound. Birds quickly responded by producing wider bandwidth songs at lower amplitudes, effectively increasing signal efficacy and salience. In contrast, behavioral responses have lagged behind increasing noise levels as restrictions on human movement have loosened over time. Although song amplitude eventually returned to pre-pandemic levels, paralleling noise levels, birds have continued to produce wide bandwidth songs, with consequences for signal masking in noise. These findings illustrate that behavioral traits are slower to change in response to newly adverse conditions, indicating non-parallel responses to noise pollution removal and re-introduction.
At 7:43 pm, Vice President Doug Futuyma thanked Dr. Derryberry, saying that the White-crowned Sparrow is a fascinating species that has been studied a lot, and that Dr. Derryberry has made it even more so. He then hosted the Q&A session.
At the conclusion of the Q&A, Vice President Futuyma thanked Dr. Derryberry again, and at 8:13 pm the meeting was adjourned.
The presentation has been recorded in its entirety, including the Q&A session and the president’s opening remarks. The recording is available for viewing on the Linnaean Society of New York website under the dropdown menu: Programs/Watch/ and on the Society’s YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/@linnaeanny/videos
Respectfully submitted by Lisa Kroop, Recording Secretary