They also discovered that these 'cryptic dialects' are decisive for the females' choice of mate. Thus, female zebra finches pay more attention to a cultural trait than to male appearance.

Each male zebra finch devlops his own song Zebra finches belong to a third singing type. Males also learn their song from conspecifics and only at an early age, but they do this in an individual ...

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To investigate, Mariette and her colleagues allowed 59 male and 52 female zebra finches to breed and collected the eggs on the same day they were laid. The team kept the eggs at 37°C for 10 days ...

More information: Yining Chen et al. Courtship song preferences in female zebra finches are shaped by developmental auditory experience, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2017).

Juvenile birds learn the length of the sounds in a song from a false memory introduced via optogenetics, instead of from real interactions with a tutor bird. Young zebra finches that receive feedback ...

Discovery of the First Germline-Restricted Gene by Subtractive Transcriptomic Analysis in the Zebra Finch, Taeniopygia guttata. Current Biology, 2018; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.03.067 ...

Male songbirds produce a subtly different tune when they are courting a female than when they are singing on their own. Now, new research offers a window into the effect this has on females, showing ...

Julie E. Elie, Nicolas Mathevon, Clémentine Vignal, Same-sex pair-bonds are equivalent to male—female bonds in a life-long socially monogamous songbird, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, Vol. 65, ...