There is increased neuronal firing in the high vocal center (a motor nucleus) and other song nuclei of canaries, Serinus canaria, and zebra finches, Taeniopygia guttata, whenever these songbirds sing or hear song. These observations suggested that song perception involved sensory and motor pathways. We now show that the act of singing, but not hearing song, induces a rapid and striking increase...

The synaptic connection from high vocal center (HVC) to robust nucleus of the arcopallium (RA) is a pivotal part of vocal motor pathway in songbirds. Electrophysiological properties of HVC-RA synaptic transmission in adult male zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata) in vivo was investigated by using field potential recording method. Following electrical stimulation of HVC, the evoked field potential...

Trans-generational antibody transfer constitutes an important mechanism by which mothers may enhance offspring resistance to pathogens. Thus, differential antibody deposition may potentially allow a female to differentiate offspring performance. Here, we examined whether maternal immunization with sheep red blood cells (SRBC) prior to egg laying affects sex-specific yolk antibody transfer and s...

A male zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata, kept with its father until adulthood develops an imitation of its father's song motif. We report here that the completeness of this imitation was sensitive to the social or auditory context in which the bird grew up: the greater the number of male siblings in a clutch, the shorter the mean duration of the song motif and the fewer the mean number of song ...

Many small birds perform short flights, for which take-offs, ascents and descents form a large component of the total flight time and which are characterised by low airspeeds. Using the doubly-labelled water technique, zebra finches Taeniopygia guttata engaging in repeated short flights were found to expend 13.65 kJ more than 'non-flying' controls, which equated to a flight expenditure of 27.8 ...

Integration is a property of biological systems that refers to the extent to which their components are correlated through functional, structural, developmental or evolutionary interdependency. This study examined patterns of functional integration among different molecular components of the blood redox system (both plasma and red blood cells) in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Our results...

Experimental synchronization of onset of incubation was employed in laboratory held zebra finches Taeniopygia guttata to study whether differential resource allocation and possible bias of offspring sex in subsequent eggs in the laying order could mitigate the effects of hatching asynchrony. We found that egg mass increased with laying order, but offspring sex was not related to laying order. A...

Humans readily distinguish spoken words that closely resemble each other in acoustic structure, irrespective of audible differences between individual voices or sex of the speakers. There is an ongoing debate about whether the ability to form phonetic categories that underlie such distinctions indicates the presence of uniquely evolved, speech-linked perceptual abilities, or is based on more ge...

Many factors, including the demonstrator's sex, status, and familiarity, shape the nature and magnitude of social learning. Given the important role of pair bonds in socially-monogamous animals, we predicted that these intimate relationships would promote the use of social information, and tested this hypothesis in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata). Observer birds witnessed either their mate ...

The extent to which early stress exposure is detrimental to darwinian fitness may depend on its severity, with mild stress exposure actually having a stimulatory and, possibly, beneficial effect through a hormetic response to the stressful stimulus. We need to understand such hormetic processes to determine how the early environment can help shape a phenotype adapted to the conditions the organ...