Zebra finches are shaped by songs they hear before they are born Shutterstock/Manu M Nair
Australian zebra finches sing a rhythmic high-pitched song while incubating their eggs in a hot environment, which researchers have named a “heat call”. Experiments now show that this call influences who the soon-to-be-born chicks choose to learn their own tunes from.
In 2018, , then at Deakin University in Australia, learned that the songbird embryos inside an egg that were exposed to a repeated parental heat call would put more syllables in their song when they matured.
To understand the influence of prenatal sound,…
