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Science Quickly

How Baby Birds Learn to Duet

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2018

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Recordings of songbird duets reveal baby birds learn conversational turn-taking like we do: gradually, and from adults. Christopher Intagliata reports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

0:05.8

Researchers at Yachtolt have been delving into the secrets of probiotics for 90 years.

0:11.0

Yacold also partners with nature portfolio to advance gut microbiome science through the global grants for gut health, an investigator-led research program.

0:19.6

To learn more about Yachtolt, visit yawcult.co.

0:22.7

.jp. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

0:33.6

This is Scientific American's 60-second science. I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

0:39.0

The word duet usually refers to a song.

0:42.5

But in a sense, every human conversation is a duet,

0:45.9

with unwritten rules about when participants take their turns to speak.

0:50.0

You can hear how awkward it sounds when the rules are broken,

0:52.9

as with the slight delay between this ABC news host and the astronaut Rick Mastrochio.

0:58.1

So give us an idea of what you guys go through on a daily basis.

1:03.7

Okay, well, we wake up fairly early.

1:05.7

That long pause, pretty uncomfortable,

1:08.9

especially if you're not talking to someone on the space station.

1:12.0

We humans first get a feel for this back-and-forth rhythm when we're still babbling babies.

1:17.1

And it turns out, same goes for songbirds in learning their duets.

1:21.3

What you should hear is something like the whistle, like, and then something like, and then tru-r-but-then-you-r- and then tru but then you hear like it's yeah

1:31.9

I'm not very good at doing the song but it seems that only one bird is singing that's how good

1:40.3

they are.

1:40.6

Carla Rivera Casares, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Miami.

1:45.0

She and her team recorded the formative songs of a bird called the Cane Break Wren, in their

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