![]() ![]() Control males preferred opposite-sex partners, as did the females from both groups. ![]() Overall, mother-deprived males overwhelmingly chose to pair with other mother-deprived males. The skewed sex ratios ensured that the birds had to compete - through songs and aggression - for their partners. In experiments where they wanted to test the partner preferences of males, they used aviaries that had twice as many males as females the opposite was true for experiments looking at the preferences of females. They then weighed the birds, and found that the mother-deprived chicks didn't suffer from any nutritional deficiencies.īanerjee and Adkins-Regan then conducted pair-bond tests by moving groups of the birds into aviaries with biased sex ratios. Once the chicks became independent, the researchers moved them to unisex aviaries, which were within ear and eye distance of each other. For the second group, the researchers removed the mothers from the nest shortly after the eggs hatched. In the control group, chicks grew up having both a mother and father. To see if parental imprinting also guides same-sex partner choices, Banerjee and her co-author Elizabeth Adkins-Regan, a behavioral neuroscientist at Cornell University, studied the development of two groups of zebra finches. And in another experiment, males with mothers that had a certain beak color preferred female partners with beaks that were more extreme in color than their mothers' beaks. For instance, one study found that females prefer partners with blue feather ornaments if their fathers had such a feature. Previous research has shown that zebra finches' mate choices are also steered by sexual imprinting. By imprinting on a mother or father during early development, offspring acquire their preferences for future mates. Among animals, sexual imprinting is a common phenomenon, in which younglings learn the features of another individual and use this learning to inform their mate choice during adulthood, Banerjee told Live Science. ![]()
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