Zebra finches remember songs dad sang
Researchers at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, believe they have located a place in the brain where songbirds store the memories of their parents' songs. The discovery has implications for humans, because humans and songbirds are among the few animals that learn to vocalize by imitating their caregivers. In a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of...Zebra finch males prefer females with exaggerated maternal traits
Researchers have demonstrated that learning about the appearance of their parents may give birds a preference for mates with exaggerated parental traits, rather than traits that more exactly match those of their parents. Such learned mate preferences may help drive the evolution of exaggerated traits and strong morphological differences between sexes ?phenomena seen frequently in birds and other...Darwin's famous finches and Venter's marine microbes
Although the Galápagos finches were to play a pivotal role in the inception of Darwin’s theory of evolution through natural selection, he had no inkling of their significance when he collected them during his voyage on the HMS Beagle. Similarly, it is hard to predict the impact the vast amount of marine microbial DNA ?collected during the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition by J....