At Night, Birds May Review The Songs They Learn During The Day
...ical activity during sleep in aregion of the zebra finch brain, called the robustus archistratalis (RA), whichis involved in singing. It is generally believed that the activity of thesleeping brain helps to consolidate what was learned during the day, but howthis occurs has never been directly shown. "One ...Sequencers take a bird in hand
...of Washington have sequenced a region of the house finch genome, providing the largest sequence available f...cantly different from mammalian genomes. The house finch belongs to a group called the Passeriformes, or perching songbirds, which contains over half the liv...How stress maintains population levels
...ogy at Cornell. "At the same time, emerging house finch colonies increased to approximately those same lev...mbers of affected birds. They estimate that house finch numbers have fallen in the East from some 300 million birds to 180 million. The disease has now sta...Singing silently during sleep helps birds learn songs
...nd principal investigator in the study. "The zebra finch appears to store the neuronal firing pattern of so... weighs only about half an ounce. The male zebra finch works hard to attract the female with his stereotyped song, and the brain structures that control si......cies splits into two or more distinct species. "As finch populations adapt to different environments, songs should evolve in step with beak evolution," says Podos. Because songs are used by females in choosing mates, the diversification of these mating signals may promote speciation. Charles Darwin exp...Competing fruit flies show evolution in action
...s, he noticed that there were many more species of finch in the small islands than on the mainland of South...re important. But when a species -- for example, a finch -- enters an environment such as a remote island with few other species already present, competition...Songbirds use mental pointer when playing tunes
That spontaneous serenade from the zebra finch is not only more rehearsed than cellist Yo-Yo Ma's...ong that lasts about a second. At one month old, a finch first tries to sing a song that it memorized while listening to its father sing. While awake, it co......ech disorders." FoxP2 is in the brain of the zebra finch in regions that control the learning of song, said...analogous regions of the human brain and the zebra finch brain," she said. White's co-authors are Ikuko Teramitsu, a UCLA graduate student in molecular, cell......ition, the team analyzed the sequence of the zebra finch gene and compared it to the human sequence. They found that the FoxP2 gene from finches was extremely similar to the human version, but did not carry the human-specific sequence variation. "Apparently, the human-specific version is not essential for......, Charles Darwin looked to 13 different species of finch from the Galapagos Islands to help bolster his the... as a major mediator of beak shape in a variety of finch species. Together, these two studies are able to point to BMP4 as having a major role in the creatio...