The nestlings of
fairy-wrens don’t have much of a choice when it comes to listening to their
mothers: The birds must reproduce a particular sound learned from their moms to
be fed, according to a
study published Thursday in the journal Current Biology.
The researchers, led by
Sonia Kleindorfer of Flinders University in Australia, call the sound the
bird’s “learned password.”
The team discovered the
remarkable mother-chick ritual by chance when they noticed that the mothers
were aiming calls at their eggs well before they hatched. So they set out to
determine why. First, the researchers realized that the call made by the
nestlings in order to be fed was different in each nest, suggesting it might be
learned.
The pieces began to come
together when the team also observed that each nest’s begging call — the
password the nestlings need — was contained within the call that the mothers
made to their unhatched eggs. In order to prove that the chicks were learning
the sound from their moms rather than the song being innate, Kleindorfer and
her team swapped the eggs from two different nests. Once hatched, the chicks
produced the begging call of their foster moms, not their birth moms, proof the
call was in fact learned in the egg.
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