Tag: "chicks" at biology news

CU study reveals why starling females cheat

...eeders, meaning breeding pairs get help in raising chicks from other family group members.) This additional ... are usually related to the chicks. By helping the chicks survive, they pass on familial genes. In contrast, some females cheat with males outside their gr...

In-shell vaccine for chick disease

...ientists are now developing a new way to vaccinate chicks against the disease ?one that can be delivered whi...accine company Intervet UK. It can be delivered to chicks still in the egg (in-ovo) using robotic 'vaccinators'. IBV is the worst infectious disease in te...

Huddling and a drop in metabolism allow penguins to survive the South Pole cold

...f the five pairs studied, three were feeding their chicks until October 2001. The experimental pairs in the study resumed with the expected breeding cycle, and their breeding success was similar to penguin pairs without device implantation. Results This study is the first to provide long-term deep ...

Female birds boost up their eggs when hearing sexy song

...ter the size of eggs and possibly the sex of their chicks according to how they perceive their mate's quality. The researchers played back attractive ("sexy") songs and less attractive control songs of male canaries to female domesticated canaries. When the females started egg-laying they varied the size ...

Poison dart frog mimics gain when birds learn to stay away

...arst performed predator experiments using domestic chicks she collected from villages outside of Quito, Ecuador. The chicks quickly learned to avoid the highly toxic frogs during training sessions and subsequently avoided al...

Animal brains 'hard-wired' to recognize predator's foot movements, Queen's study suggests

...ator or prey is nearby. "Research on newly hatched chicks suggests that it works from very early on in an animal's development," says Dr. Troje. "It seems like their brains are 'hard wired' for this type of recognition." One impetus for starting this research several years ago was a question by his young...

USC researchers track down the stem cells that create feathers

...le, the radially symmetric downy feathers found on chicks and on the trunks of adults are designed for warmth, while the bilaterally symmetric feathers found on the adult wing are designed for taking flight. What Chuong and his colleagues found, to their surprise, was that the orientation of the ring of f...

Removing egg from nest may help save endangered whooping crane

...t. Sibling aggression has been so strong that some chicks have been observed pecking the later-born bird to death. Also, a pair of chicks is more likely to attract the attention of a predator and parents can be more attentive if they only...

What comes first…the chicken, the egg, or the bad attitude?

...ential and are also capable of producing many more chicks than usual. The more typical pattern is for the hen to lose some body weight to support egg production. "The trouble with this is that these 'martyr birds' may eventually suffer from burnout when they don't balance their own needs well enough," Dr. R...

Penguin chicks exposed to human visitors experience spike in stress hormone

Newly hatched magellanic penguin chicks in breeding grounds with a large number of human v... in levels of a stress-related hormone compared to chicks hatched in areas not visited by humans, a University of Washington research team has found. It wasn...

Looks matter to female barn swallows

...or was unchanged fathered the same number or fewer chicks than they had in their first nests. "The study shows that the females are paying close attention to these signals and that they respond quickly to changes in their mate's appearance," said Safran. The reddish breast and belly feathers indicate a ma...

The lopsided brain: Attention bias is shared by humans and birds

...positioned at the midline of the search area, both chicks and pigeons showed a considerable leftward bias in pecking. The experiment is similar in concept to those that reveal pseudoneglect in humans--so-called cancellation tasks in which subjects are asked to "cancel-out" evenly distributed visual targets ...

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