Studying the cultural evolution of song in birds
This week’s reading was about vocal learning, and in the lecture I focussed on grammar learning. The tutorial exercise this week picks up on both topics, and since it’s so interesting we’ll return to a related topic next week.
For this week’s tutorial, read Fehér et al. (2009) and Fehér et al. (2017) - they are both very short! Don’t worry about the technicalities of the acoustic analysis (unless you are in to it), but try to get the gist of what they are describing; you can also skip the mathematical model in the 2009 paper.
To get a feel for zebra finch song, have a listen to the songs below - 6 wild-type song examples, then 6 mystery songs. The mystery songs are in two groups: songs 1-3 and songs A-C. One of these two groups are songs of isolate birds, and the other group is songs from birds from later generations in the Fehér et al (2009) experiments (a generation 2 bird, a generation 3 bird, and a 5th generation bird from their colony). Can you guess based on the description in the paper which group of songs is the isolate and which group is the more wild-type-like song? This may be challenging! How distinctive do the two song types seem to you? Are you surprised by similarities or differences across or within these song groups?
Questions:
Dr. Olga Fehér very kindly shared the zebra finch songs included above.
Fehér, O., Wang, H., Saar, S. et al. De novo establishment of wild-type song culture in the zebra finch. Nature, 459, 564–568. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature07994
Fehér, O., Ljubičić, I., Suzuki, K., Okanoya, K., & Tchernichovski, O. (2017). Statistical learning in songbirds: from self-tutoring to song culture. *Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 372, B37220160053.https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2016.0053
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