![]() Each time a bird visited a feeder, antennas picked up signals from its tag, reporting who was dining with whom. Upon fledging, the birds were marked with electronic tags and released into two aviaries, where they were free to mingle. Boogert and her team took 13 broods of Zebra Finches and gave half of the chicks in each brood the stress hormone corticosterone. “It does make you think of rebellious teenagers,” says Neeltje Boogert, a visiting research fellow at the University of Cambridge in England, who co-authored the study. But as the new study published in Current Biology shows, when young finches are stressed, they look to unrelated members of the flock for advice. They aren’t born knowing how to sing, find food, or choose a mate they acquire these skills by watching and imitating their parents. Zebra Finches are affable Australian songbirds that thrive in captivity (which is why they’re commonly used in experiments). Last month, researchers reported that stressed-out juvenile Zebra Finches ignore their parents’ foraging behavior and pick up tips from other birds in the flock instead. ![]() Now here’s a story that smells a lot like teen spirit.
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