Natures wonders: female zebra finch recognizes mate (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 13, 2016, 01:36 (2992 days ago) @ David Turell

Zebra finches are very social and live in large flocks. But they mate for life so recognition is important, and they have it:-http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/not-bad-science/female-zebra-finches-recognize-their-mates-faces/?WT.mc_id=SA_DD_20160912-"One study that received a lot of media attention a few years ago showed that wasps could recognise each other's' faces. Now, a recent study just published in Animal Behaviour has found that zebra finches also recognise each other's faces. Zebra finches are socially monogamous, building nests and breeding together for multiple breeding seasons. However, when not breeding they exist in flocks of up to 300 birds. Therefore, it would seem highly likely that individuals would be able to recognise their mates in order to mate with them again the following season. It's been known that females do know the sound of their male partner (what he sounds like when he sings his song), but the researchers wanted to know if females could also identify their partners from his visual appearance.-***-"Once trained to peck at the screen for a food reward, the female was then trained to peck at a photo of her mate for a food reward. She was also shown photos of an unknown male, and was not rewarded for pecking at him. To test whether the female had actually learned to identify the male, and not just a single photo, the female was then shown four new photos: two of her male and two of the unknown male. The females pecked at the photos of their partners, showing that they had learned what these males looked like.-***-"Interestingly, it seems that zebra finch females were able to recognise the faces of males when they lived with them in small flocks, but not when they lived with them in larger flocks. What's more, they were much better at recognising the face of their male partner than of another male in their small flock.-"Why might it be that it's harder to train females to recognise males from larger groups? One possibility is that because even when zebra finches live in larger flocks, they tend to make smaller sub-groups that they hang around in. Thus the males that were shown to the females from the larger group may have been very socially distant to them. It is also likely that in ‘real life' the females also use other cues to recognise males (like their songs) and that the visual cue on the screen isn't as salient as seeing the males in real life (just as for us, sometimes it can be harder to recognise someone in a photo than in real life)."-Comment: I don't find this at all surprising, knowing that birds have sharp vision.