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Science Talk

These Endangered Birds Are Forgetting Their Songs

Science Talk

Scientific American

Science

4.2644 Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2021

⏱️ 3 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Australia’s critically endangered regent honeyeaters are losing what amounts to their culture—and that could jeopardize their success at landing a mate. 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, visitacult.co.com.j.j.

0:23.9

That's y-A-K-U-L-T.c-O-J-P.

0:28.4

When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacolt.

0:32.7

This is Scientific American's 60-second science.

0:36.3

I'm Christopher in Taliatta.

0:39.2

Some birds are relatively easy to study. Ross Crates studies the ones that aren't. He's part of the

0:44.9

difficult bird research group at the Australian National University. All our study species are

0:50.1

quite challenging to study for various reasons, mostly because they're really rare and highly

0:55.4

mobile. One of those difficult birds is the critically endangered Regent Honey-eater. They're

1:00.4

medium-sized songbirds, with bright yellow tails and black and white chests. And though they

1:05.0

once roamed Australia in flocks of hundreds, fewer than 300 remain in the wild today.

1:10.3

Crates and his team tracked the birds over a five-year period.

1:13.2

If they encountered a male, they'd record his song.

1:19.6

And they noted whether the males were paired up with females.

1:23.2

They found that a quarter of the birds sang variations of the traditional honey eater song.

1:28.3

And 12% of the birds weren't singing honey eater songs at all.

1:31.5

They were parroting different species songs, like this.

1:37.2

Or this one.

1:39.8

That could mean bad news for the bird's future, because males singing those untraditional

...

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