A male house sparrow with a black ‘bib’ on his throat. Image credit: Sánchez-Tójar et al. (CC BY 4.0)
Many bird species have colourful, intricately patterned plumage. This ornamentation is generally believed to exist to attract partners. In the 1970s, however, scientists proposed an alternative idea, called the ‘status signalling hypothesis’. This suggests that some birds have plumage ornaments that indicate the fighting abilities or dominance status of their bearers, much like the military badges worn by humans. These badges of status might evolve because fights, which commonly determine who gets valuable resources such as food, are a risky business. Individuals would greatly benefit from being able to predict the fighting abilities of any potential competitor and so avoid fights that they will probably lose.
Male house sparrows have a black patch on their throat, known as the bib, that has been considered to be a textbook demonstration of the status signalling hypothesis. However, most of the studies that support this idea studied small numbers of birds and used inconsistent methods. Furthermore, some recent studies have failed to replicate previous findings.
Sánchez-Tójar et al. collected data from several house sparrow populations across the world and systematically scrutinized the published literature to find all of the studies that tested the status signalling hypothesis in house sparrows. This revealed only weak evidence that the bib of male house sparrows signals the fighting abilities of its bearer. Instead, the published literature is a biased subsample; failures to replicate the hypothesis likely remain unpublished.
Currently, failures to replicate previous findings are generally deemed uninteresting, and so are not often published. By demonstrating the need to replicate findings robustly to avoid biasing conclusions, Sánchez-Tójar et al. thus join the call for a change in incentives and scientific culture.
