do zebra finch parents fail to recognise their own offspring斑胸草雀父母不能承认自己的后代呢.pdfVIP

Do Zebra Finch Parents Fail to Recognise Their Own Offspring? 1 1,2,3 1 Hendrik Reers *, Alain Jacot , Wolfgang Forstmeier 1 Department of Behavioural Ecology and Evolutionary Genetics, Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Seewiesen, Germany, 2 Field Station Valais, Swiss Ornithological Institute, Salgesch, Switzerland, 3 IEE-Conservation Biology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland Abstract Individual recognition systems require the sender to be individually distinctive and the receiver to be able to perceive differences between individuals and react accordingly. Many studies have demonstrated that acoustic signals of almost any species contain individualized information. However, fewer studies have tested experimentally if those signals are used for individual recognition by potential receivers. While laboratory studies using zebra finches have shown that fledglings recognize their parents by their ‘‘distance call’’, mutual recognition using the same call type has not been demonstrated yet. In a laboratory study with zebra finches, we first quantified between-individual acoustic variation in distance calls of fledglings. In a second step, we tested recognition of fledgling calls by parents using playback experiments. With a discriminant function analysis, we show that individuals are highly distinctive and most measured parameters show very high potential to encode for individuality. The response pattern of zebra finch parents shows that they do react to calls of fledglings, however they do not distinguish between own and unfamiliar offspring, despite individual distinctiveness. This finding is interesting in light of the observation of a high percentage of misdirected feedings in our communal breeding a