Zebra finches are shaped by the songs they hear before they are born
Shutterstock/Manu M Nair
Australian zebra finches sing a rhythmic, high-pitched song while incubating their eggs in a warm environment, which researchers have termed a “heat call”. Experiments now show that this call influences unborn chicks who choose to learn their own tunes.
In 2018, Andrew Katsis, then at Deakin University in Australia, learned that songbird embryos inside an egg that were exposed to a repeated parental call for heat would put more syllables into their song when they would mature.
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