Avian trichomonosis, caused by the flagellated protozoan Trichomonas gallinae, is a recently emerged infectious disease of British passerines. The aetiological agent, a clonal epidemic strain of the parasite, has caused unprecedented finch mortality and population-level declines in Britain and has since spread to continental Europe. To better understand the potential origin of this epidemic and...

The movement for open access to science seeks to achieve unrestricted and free access to academic publications on the Internet. To this end, two mechanisms have been established: the gold road, in which scientific journals are openly accessible, and the green road, in which publications are self-archived in repositories. The publication of the Finch Report in 2012, advocating exclusively the ad...

Trans-generational transfer of non-genetic, maternal resources such as hormones can have a substantial influence on offspring phenotype in many vertebrate species. In birds, maternal androgens enhance both growth and competitive behaviour, but also suppress the immune system. It has been hypothesised that high levels of egg androgens could also influence the prooxidant-antioxidant balance throu...

All jawed vertebrates produce immunoglobulins (IGs) as a defense mechanism against pathogens. Typically, IGs are composed of two identical heavy chains (IGH) and two identical light chains (IGL). Most tetrapod species encode more than one isotype of light chains. Chicken is the only representative of birds for which genomic information is currently available and is an exception to the above rul...

Without regular monitoring a rare species may slip into extinction unnoticed. We report a possible case from the Galápagos archipelago. The warbler finch (Certhidea fusca) has not been recorded by scientists on Isla Floreana in recent years, and we have been concerned about its status. On a two-day visit to prime habitat in the breeding season of 2004 we used playback of warbler finch song and ...

Begging calls are signals of need used by young birds to elicit care from adults. Different theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand this parent-offspring communication. But relationships between parental response and begging intensity, or between begging characteristics and proxies of a young's need remain puzzling. Few studies have considered the adjustment of nestling begging ...

The brains of adult zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) are tuned to the songs of conspecifics. In adult males, the caudomedial neostriatum (NCM) responds to zebra finch song, and in adult females the NCM and hippocampus (HP) are active following exposure to zebra finch song more than other auditory stimuli. The caudal hyperstriatum ventrale (cHV) in both sexes also responds to song, but in fem...

Songbird species (order Passeriformes, suborder Oscines) are important models in various experimental fields spanning behavioural genomics to neurobiology. Although the genomes of some songbird species were sequenced recently, the chromosomal organization of these species is mostly unknown. Here we focused on the two most studied songbird species in neuroscience, the zebra finch (Taeniopygia gu...

The song of the male Zebra Finch is the primary means of identification of one individual from other males of the same species. In order to serve that purpose, it needs to have a statistical structure that allows robust separation from the rich acoustic environment in the bird colony, as well as enough degrees of freedom to allow specificity at the level of the individual bird. Since second-ord...

We enthusiastically advocate the zebra finch, a songbird, as a target of highest priority for whole genome sequencing. The zebra finch is an established research organism with particular relevance to human neuroscience and a proven track record of influential ground breaking discoveries that have informed human biology. Evolutionary considerations, such as distance from other sequenced genomes,...