"What I find particularly fascinating about this study is that the application of artificial intelligence is not just used to confirm existing knowledge. This effect of dialect preference was much stronger than the tendency to choose a mate based on his appearance. As it turned out, females preferred partners who sang the same dialect as the males with whom these females grew up. Using a camera-based system that detected the QR codes allowed the scientists to automatically track all social interactions. All zebra finches were fitted with a small backpack carrying a QR code and released together in a large aviary. body size) and culturally acquired traits (e.g. This led to zebra finches with different combinations of genetic traits (e.g. For this purpose, zebra finch chicks of one population were raised by zebra finch parents from another population. The researchers conducted so-called "cross-fostering" experiments to tease apart the roles of genes and culture in mate choice. Importantly, the new study also shows that these dialects are biologically highly relevant, as they play a key role in mate choice. It appears that there are cryptic dialects in zebra finches, which remained undetected by conventional analysis methods." Foster parents with different dialect and appearance Wolfgang Forstmeier, one of the two lead authors of the study, explains: "We were indeed surprised by this result. When the scientists fed the program with the songs of subsequent generations, the program assigned them to the correct population with remarkable accuracy. To do this, the researchers trained a "Sound Classifier" with the songs of males from four different, separately kept zebra finch populations. However, together with collaborators, their doctoral student Daiping Wang and other members of their research group, Wolfgang Forstmeier and Bart Kempenaers have now been able to detect dialects in zebra finch songs using artificial intelligence. Because of these individual signatures in songs, it has long been assumed that dialect formation is not possible in zebra finches. Each male develops his own little song which he then uses for a lifetime – as if he wanted to communicate his identity, his name. Males also learn their song from conspecifics and only at an early age, but they do this in an individual-specific manner. Zebra finches belong to a third singing type. Each male zebra finch devlops his own song Within a region, all males sing their song in the same way, but between regions, songs differ and obvious borders can be identified where two dialects meet. However, such species with 'uniformist' song often show variation at a larger geographic scale. They copy the sounds of their conspecifics as closely as possible, and thereby make it easy for anyone to recognize the species. In other species, such as the yellowhammer, males are a lot more stereotypic and uniform. Throughout their life, they acquire new sounds and thus can vary their songs accordingly, possibly because this impresses the females the most. In some of the >5000 songbird species, the males are real ‘virtuosos’. Which species is it, and which individual? In either case it should be clear from the signal who the sender of the message is. A male’s song may serve to repel a male neighbor, or to attract a female. However, if we want to understand why birds sing, we have to consider that song may have multiple functions.
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