By Jonathan Webb Science
reporter, BBC News
19 August 2016
When the weather is hot, zebra
finches in Australia sing to their eggs - and these "incubation
calls" change the chicks' development, a study has found.
The surprising discovery suggests
that the birds are preparing their offspring for warm conditions after they
hatch.
Scientists collected eggs and
incubated them in controlled conditions, playing recordings of the incubation
song.
Compared to a control group,
hatchlings that received these calls grew more slowly and coped better in the
heat.
Writing in the
journal Science, the researchers say this is the sort of adaptation
that could help animals acclimatise to rising global temperatures.
"It doesn't mean that they
will still be able to breed at extreme temperatures - this was within the range
they currently experience," said the paper's lead author Mylene Mariette,
from Deakin University in Geelong.
"But what's encouraging is
that it's a strategy that the birds use to adjust the growth of their offspring
to temperature, that we didn't know about."
It is also the first time that
singing to unborn chicks has been shown to yield such long-term results.
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