Mobbing behavior, in addition to its complex cooperative aspects, is particularly suitable to study the mechanisms implicated in heterospecific communication. Indeed, various mechanisms ranging from pure learning to innate recognition have been proposed. One promising, yet understudied mechanism could be syntax recognition, especially given the latest works published on syntax comprehension in birds. In this experiment, we test whether great tits use both learning and syntax recognition when responding to heterospecifics. In the first part of the experiment, we demonstrate that great tits show different responses to the same heterospecific calls depending on their sympatric status. In a second part, we explore the impact of reorganizing the notes of the heterospecific mobbing calls to fit the syntax of great tits. Great tits showed an increased mobbing response toward the heterospecific calls when they shared their own call organization. Our results corroborate the recent finding that syntactic rules in bird calls may have a strong impact on their communication systems and enlighten how various mechanisms can be used by the same species to respond to heterospecific calls.

All information regarding this dataset in present in the published article. Briefly, this is a playback experiment in which we tested the response of the great tit to mobbing calls of coal tits with different call organisations (wild and free ranging individuals). This experiment was done in France, test were short (90sec), and we recorded several behavioural variables (call, approach, scans, wing flicks and tail flits). We provide all information necessary to replicate the analyses and plots in the article.

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