Dataset Information

Parental influence on begging call structure in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata): evidence of early vocal plasticity.

ABSTRACT: Begging calls are signals of need used by young birds to elicit care from adults. Different theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand this parent-offspring communication. But relationships between parental response and begging intensity, or between begging characteristics and proxies of a young's need remain puzzling. Few studies have considered the adjustment of nestling begging features to previous experience as a possible explanation of these discrepancies. In this study, we tested the effect of a heterospecific rearing environment on individual developmental trajectories of the acoustic structure of nestling begging calls. Fifty-two zebra finch chicks were fostered either to Bengalese finch or to zebra finch parents, and begging calls were recorded at several stages of nestling development. Acoustic analyses revealed that the development of the spectral features of the begging calls differed between experimental conditions: chicks reared by Bengalese finches produced higher pitched and less broadband begging calls than chicks reared by conspecific parents. Differences were stronger in males than females and were not explained by differences in growth rate. We conclude that nestling begging calls can be plastic in response to social interactions with parents.

SUBMITTER: Villain AS

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4680624 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Parental influence on begging call structure in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata): evidence of early vocal plasticity.

Villain Avelyne S AS Boucaud Ingrid C A IC Bouchut Colette C Vignal Clémentine C

Royal Society open science 20151125 11

Begging calls are signals of need used by young birds to elicit care from adults. Different theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand this parent-offspring communication. But relationships between parental response and begging intensity, or between begging characteristics and proxies of a young's need remain puzzling. Few studies have considered the adjustment of nestling begging features to previous experience as a possible explanation of these discrepancies. In this study, we tes ...[more]

PMID: 26716009

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Project description:BackgroundThe relevance of the host microbiota to host ecology and evolution is well acknowledged. However, the effect of the microbial environment on host immune function and host microbiota dynamics is understudied in terrestrial vertebrates. Using a novel experimental approach centered on the manipulation of the microbial environment of zebra finches Taeniopygia guttata, we carried out a study to investigate effects of the host's microbial environment on: 1) constitutive immune function, 2) the resilience of the host cloacal microbiota; and 3) the degree to which immune function and host microbiota covary in microbial environments that differ in diversity.ResultsWe explored immune indices (hemagglutination, hemolysis, IgY levels and haptoglobin concentration) and host-associated microbiota (diversity and composition) in birds exposed to two experimental microbial environments differing in microbial diversity. According to our expectations, exposure to experimental microbial environments led to differences related to specific antibodies: IgY levels were elevated in the high diversity treatment, whereas we found no effects for the other immune indices. Furthermore, according to predictions, we found significantly increased richness of dominant OTUs for cloacal microbiota of birds of the high diversity compared with the low diversity group. In addition, cloacal microbiota of individual females approached their baseline state sooner in the low diversity environment than females in the high diversity environment. This result supported a direct phenotypically plastic response of host microbiota, and suggests that its resilience depends on environmental microbial diversity. Finally, immune indices and cloacal microbiota composition tend to covary within treatment groups, while at the same time, individuals exhibited consistent differences of immune indices and microbiota characteristics.ConclusionWe show that microbes in the surroundings of terrestrial vertebrates can influence immune function and host-associated microbiota dynamics over relatively short time scales. We suggest that covariation between immune indices and cloacal microbiota, in addition to large and consistent differences among individuals, provides potential for evolutionary adaptation. Ultimately, our study highlights that linking environmental and host microbiotas may help unravelling immunological variation within and potentially among species, and together these efforts will advance the integration of microbial ecology and ecological immunology.

Project description:Zebra finches rely mainly on syllable phonology rather than on syllable sequence when they discriminate between two songs. However, they can also learn to discriminate two strings containing the same set of syllables by their sequence. How learning about the phonological characteristics of syllables and their sequence relate to each other and to the composition of the stimuli is still an open question. We compared whether and how the zebra finches' relative sensitivity for syllable phonology and syllable sequence depends on the differences between syllable strings. Two groups of zebra finches were trained in a Go-Left/Go-Right task to discriminate either between two strings in which each string contained a unique set of song syllables ('Different-syllables group') or two strings in which both strings contained the same set of syllables, but in a different sequential order ('Same-syllables group'). We assessed to what extent the birds in the two experimental groups attend to the spectral characteristics and the sequence of the syllables by measuring the responses to test strings consisting of spectral modifications or sequence changes. Our results showed no difference in the number of trials needed to discriminate strings consisting of either different or identical sets of syllables. Both experimental groups attended to changes in spectral features in a similar way, but the group for which both training strings consisted of the same set of syllables responded more strongly to changes in sequence than the group for which the training strings consisted of different sets of syllables. This outcome suggests the presence of an additional learning process to learn about syllable sequence when learning about syllable phonology is not sufficient to discriminate two strings. Our study thus demonstrates that the relative importance of syllable phonology and sequence depends on how these features vary among stimuli. This indicates cognitive flexibility in the acoustic features that songbirds might use in their song recognition.

Dataset Information

Parental influence on begging call structure in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata): evidence of early vocal plasticity.

Publications

Parental influence on begging call structure in zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata): evidence of early vocal plasticity.

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