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Science Quickly

Inbred Songbirds Croon out of Tune

Science Quickly

Scientific American

Science

4.2639 Ratings

🗓️ 28 July 2016

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Inbred canaries sang songs with less pure tones, and at slightly different pitches, than their outbred cousins—and female canaries seemed to be able to tell the difference.   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

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0:11.0

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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 Yacolt.

0:33.6

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

0:39.0

Just like humans have to learn to talk, songbirds aren't born singing.

0:43.5

They have to learn to carry a tune.

0:45.3

So in the beginning, they just babble.

0:47.4

Raisa DeBoer, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Antwerp in Belgium.

0:52.0

And they learn from a tutor, so they need an example song

0:55.8

in order to learn it. She says that example song might come from the chick's father, and over

1:01.5

time the baby bird tweaks that tweet to make it its own. And then it takes almost a year until

1:07.3

they're fully adult and until the next spring for the final song to come out.

1:13.1

DeBora and her colleagues investigated that song learning process in Canaries,

1:17.0

using two groups of baby birds.

1:19.0

The first consisted of inbred birds whose parents were siblings.

1:22.4

The second had parents that were unrelated.

1:25.2

And the researchers found that the songs of inbred birds...

1:28.3

...and those of the other outbred birds...

1:36.3

...sound pretty similar to the human ear.

1:46.1

I cannot tell the difference.

...

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