Data for: Behavioural responses of songbirds to preen oil odour cues of sex and species
Description
DATA: Results from 3 behavioural trials and 2 analsyes of similarities (of preen oil chemical composition). Experiment 1: Conspecific preen oil versus absence of preen oil odour cues We presented subjects with a two-choice test involving same-sex preen oil in one maze arm, and residual solvent only in the other arm. Experiment 2: Opposite-sex versus same-sex conspecific preen oil We presented subjects with a two-choice test involving opposite-sex preen oil in one maze arm and same-sex preen oil in the other arm. Experiment 3: Cowbird preen oil versus absence of preen oil odour cues We presented subjects with a two-choice test involving preen oil from a female cowbird in one maze arm and residual solvent only in the other arm. Preen Oil Analysis: We quantified the relative size of each chromatogram peak identified by GC-FID, retaining for analysis only peaks that comprised ≥ 0.1% of the total chromatogram area. To prevent large peaks from disproportionately influencing distance measures, we normalized the data using the ‘range’ method in the decostand function in the ‘vegan’ package in R. We log x + 1 transformed the normalized dataset then constructed pairwise matrices of Bray-Curtis dissimilarity, which we interpret as chemical distances between samples. To assess the statistical significance of chemical differences between the sexes and between species, we used nonparametric analysis of similarities (ANOSIM) with 10,000 iterations.