Songs, booms, and chorus… Bioacoustic studies of communication and interrelations in some bird species

SemIDEEV
 09/01/2026
 12:00:00
 Fanny Rybak, maîtresse de conférence à l’Université Paris-Saclay, Equipe Communications acoustiques, Institut des Neurosciences Paris-Saclay
 IDEEV - Salle Rosalind Franklin

ll environments, either terrestrial or aquatic, all ecosystems, are full of sounds. Some of these sounds are acoustic signals: some of their physical parameters encode information. Acoustic signals are exchanged between individuals in a communication context, and contribute to the achievement of many vital functions, in multiple species of Vertebrates and Arthropods. Exploring the diversity of produced signals, the information they support, how they are perceived, decoded, and interpreted, and how they participate to the life and to the interrelationships of animals is the goal of bioacoustics. Birds, who constitute 1/5 of vertebrate species, are highly vocal, and their vocalisations constitute a very significant part of biophony in soundscapes. As an associate professor in bioacoustics and ethology, I was involved in several research projects of acoustic communication in birds. To explore and understand what birds say, how and why they say it, will be the subject of the talk, through the study of singular sound systems of different bird species. Specifically, I will talk about birdsong and the coding-decoding systems of information, related to its territorial defence function, about how acoustic signals participate to communication in a reproductive context studied in a target species producing very low frequency booms, and at the scale of group living, I will present how signals allow inter and intra group communication, studied in a target species producing chorus.