Male zebra finches learn their song by imitating conspecifics. To stand out in the crowd, each male develops its own unique song. Because of this individual-specific song, it was long assumed that ...

Male zebra finches learn their song by imitating conspecifics. To stand out in the crowd, each male develops its own unique song. Because of this individual-specific song, it was long assumed that ...

Animals learn by imitating behaviors, such as when a baby mimics her mother’s speaking voice or a young male zebra finch copies the mating song of an older male tutor, often his father. In a study ...

The babbling of zebra finches creates connections in the brain that enable them to memorize the song of their tutor. The picture shows a zebra finch chick (2nd from left) between a female (left) and a ...

Female zebra finches that did not learn courtship songs from their fathers in their youth can learn the courtship melody as adults through the experience of living with a male, a new study has found.

Researchers have developed a new algorithm capable of identifying features of male zebra finch songs that may underlie the distinction between a short phrase sung during courtship, and the same phrase ...

It goes a little something like this: A young male zebra finch, whose father taught him a song, shared that song with a brother, with the two youngsters then creating new tunes based on dad’s ...

When a thirsty and lonely male zebra finch changes his mind from getting a drink of water to prioritizing courtship, his dopamine-releasing brain cells reflect his new intensions A pair of Zebra ...

Bird watching has been popular for centuries, and songbirds have been favored subjects. During the past 30 years, songbirds have become popular laboratory animals as well. The expanded use of ...

There is increasing evidence that exposure to stress during development can have sustained effects on animal phenotype and performance across lifehistory stages. For example, developmental stress has ...

Skyrmions are tiny whirlpools of magnetic spin that some researchers believe have useful properties that could unlock new kinds of computing. However, getting skyrmions to perform useful computational ...

They say that hindsight is 20/20, and though the theory of ecological speciation—which holds that new species emerge in response to ecological changes—seems to hold in retrospect, it has been ...