Karan Odom - Listening to Nature’s Divas: what female songsters have to tell us
Originally presented on November 16, 2021 at 6PM ET, Karan Odom lets us listen to the vibrant yet understudied world of female birdsongs.
Most bird enthusiasts are familiar with the intricate, beautiful songs of male songbirds. However, it is less well known that females of many bird species also sing. While male songbirds sing to attract mates or defend territories, the reasons that females sing can be much broader, including competing for year-round resources for herself and her young. However, there is still a lot to learn about the extent of differences between male and female songs, the reasons that female songbirds sing, and the evolutionary pressures that led female songbirds to sing in the first place. Dr. Karan Odom will provide a glimpse into the world’s diversity of female bird songs and explain what these natural divas have to tell us.
Karan Odom is a behavioral ecologist interested in how animals evolved their often complex behaviors. She is especially interested in the evolution of elaborate bird songs in female as well as male songbirds. She combines phylogenetic comparative methods with field studies in order to tease apart the evolutionary processes responsible for the biogeographical patterns we see in female and male song today. Karan is a research associate at the University of Maryland, College Park, and recently completed a postdoc at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Karan received her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) studying male and female song in troupials, a tropical oriole in Puerto Rico, and her masters at the University of Windsor in Ontario studying the function and geographic variation in Barred Owl duets. Karan also runs a citizen science project (the Female Bird Song Project – www.femalebirdsong.org), encouraging wildlife enthusiasts to help document the understudied singing behaviors of female songbirds.
The meeting will include a healthy Q&A section after remarks by Dr. Karan Odom.
