Female birds choose best singers to have smarter...( ainst intruders. I would make the best...)

ainst intruders. I would make the best mate for you and the best father for our children, so you should choose me!" The Cornell research showed that males with the most elaborate songs have bigger brains -- and, in particular, a larger region called the high vocal center, or HVC, that is essential for song learning and production -- to back up their braggadocio. Furthermore, females consistently choose males with the most elaborate songs, according to research studies. And the larger brain structures facilitate learning of complex songs and other skills. Most intriguing to neurobiologists is the finding that larger brain structures can be inherited.

The bird brain-song studies are helping to explain a phenomenon that puzzled Charles Darwin. While Darwin's natural selection clearly accounts for certain traits, like bigger antlers, that enhance survivability, he wondered about bigger and brighter tail feathers, for example, or complex songs that would seem to imperil animals by attracting predators. So Darwin proposed that a different process -- sexual selection -- is at work when potential mates are pairing up.

Still, evolutionary biologists had trouble explaining why secondary sexual characteristics, such as colorful plumage, are inherited. Recent technological developments, including better measurement techniques as well as cleverly designed experiments and statistical tools to determine heritability all helped show what the female really is getting when she falls for the fancy song.

Now the research poses a subsequent question: How do females get smart enough to choose the smartest males?

"Choosing the most elaborate song -- the one with 40 notes instead of 38 -- is not a trivial task," DeVoogd observed. "It takes us (scientists) three hours, with the most sophisticated computer sound-pattern analysis programs, and she does it in 10 to 15 minutes. The females must have some very special abilities to distinguish good songs, to recogni
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Contact: Roger Segelken
hrs2@cornell.edu
607-255-9736
Cornell University News Service
15-Nov-2000

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