5/1/2023 0 Comments Female zebraThe emergence of the ability to produce learned vocalizations is associated with the evolution of the forebrain vocal control system, an interconnected network of brain nuclei that shapes the song during learning and organizes the motor output when singing. Songbirds, which make up about half of all extant bird species, have the ability to learn complex vocalizations like song and certain types of distance calls beside their innate call repertoire, whereas the closely related suboscine species produce only unlearned song and calls. Relevant data are available from the corresponding author.įunding: The study was undertaken with the budget of the Max Planck Society ( The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Most of the raw data are in the form of wave files and the total storage occupied exceeds 10 TB. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: The authors confirm that all data underlying the findings are fully available without restriction. Received: MaAccepted: SeptemPublished: October 14, 2014Ĭopyright: © 2014 Ter Maat et al. The results suggest that the song system evolved from a brain circuit controlling simple unlearned calls to a system capable of producing acoustically rich, learned vocalizations.Ĭitation: Ter Maat A, Trost L, Sagunsky H, Seltmann S, Gahr M (2014) Zebra Finch Mates Use Their Forebrain Song System in Unlearned Call Communication. The unique combination of acoustic monitoring together with wireless brain recording of individual zebra finches in groups shows that the neuronal activity of the song system correlates with the production of unlearned stack calls. To investigate the role of the song control system in call-based male female communication, we recorded the electrical activity in a premotor nucleus of the song control system in freely behaving male birds. We find that group living paired males and females communicate using bilateral stack calling. To determine unequivocally the calls produced by each member of a group, we mounted miniature wireless microphones on each zebra finch. In addition to song, zebra finches produce large numbers of soft, unlearned calls, among which “stack” calls are uttered frequently. The neural basis for song learning and production is formed by interconnected song nuclei: the song control system. It turns out, the female finches remained selective and got creative: The female birds who ended up without a mate still laid plenty of eggs, but instead of taking care of them, the finches dumped them in other nests.Unlearned calls are produced by all birds whereas learned songs are only found in three avian taxa, most notably in songbirds. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology simulated scenarios where female finches did not have much choice in males to understand if being picky affected the number of offspring the female finches ended up having. But in a setting where there are not that many male birds, researchers recently found that this pickiness has little effect on reproduction. One of the only proven preferences that female zebra finches have is for male birds that sing in the same dialect as them, meaning they have songs similar to those in the female finch’s home habitat. While true for many creatures, this is not really the case for monogamous zebra finches. Nature documentaries ripe with images of bouncing birds with crazy plumage have led us to believe that animal preferences have a lot to do with natural selection.
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