Welcome to The CCNY Laboratory of Animal Behavior

Culture in the lab: development of song culture in the zebra finch

Zebra finch raised in isolation develop abnormal songs. We designed an experiment to determine whether wild-type song culture might emerge over multiple generations in an isolated colony founded by isolates. In tutoring lineages starting from isolate founders, we quantified alterations in song across tutoring generations. We found that juveniles imitated
the isolate tutors but changed certain characteristics of the songs. These alterations accumulated over learning generations. Consequently, songs evolved towards the wild-type in three to four generations. Thus, species-typical song culture can appear de novo.

Click here to download our Nature article about development of song culture

Click here to read Olga Feher's PhD dissertation about song culture

Click here to download examples of song-culture development

How a song is born

Zebra finches learn their song during two months of development (days 30-90 post hatch). Over that time, they listen to adult birds (tutors) and produce 1-2 million song syllables. We record ALL of them. The images below show the distribution of song syllables during early and late song development. Each dot represents one syllable, presenting the duration of that syllable versus its frequency modulation:

clusters

Download a movie of syllable types emerging out of an amorphous cloud of undifferentiated sounds (30Mb)

How sleep affect song learning

As mentioned above, zebra finches sing about 1-2 million syllables over song development, or to be accurate, during the days of song development. What do they do over night? Sleep, of course. But sleep is an active process, and it appears that vocal changes occur during sleep. Those changes are stronger, and qualitatively different than changes that occur during daytime singing.

sleep sleep