Université de Lyon/Saint-Etienne , Neuro-PSI/ENES CNRS UMR 9197, France.
R Soc Open Sci. 2015 Nov 25;2(11):150497. doi: 10.1098/rsos.150497. eCollection 2015 Nov.
Begging calls are signals of need used by young birds to elicit care from adults. Different theoretical frameworks have been proposed to understand this parent-offspring communication. But relationships between parental response and begging intensity, or between begging characteristics and proxies of a young's need remain puzzling. Few studies have considered the adjustment of nestling begging features to previous experience as a possible explanation of these discrepancies. In this study, we tested the effect of a heterospecific rearing environment on individual developmental trajectories of the acoustic structure of nestling begging calls. Fifty-two zebra finch chicks were fostered either to Bengalese finch or to zebra finch parents, and begging calls were recorded at several stages of nestling development. Acoustic analyses revealed that the development of the spectral features of the begging calls differed between experimental conditions: chicks reared by Bengalese finches produced higher pitched and less broadband begging calls than chicks reared by conspecific parents. Differences were stronger in males than females and were not explained by differences in growth rate. We conclude that nestling begging calls can be plastic in response to social interactions with parents.
乞食叫声是幼鸟用来引起成鸟照顾的需求信号。已经提出了不同的理论框架来理解这种亲代-后代的通讯。但是，父母的反应与乞食强度之间的关系，或者乞食特征与幼鸟需求的代表之间的关系仍然令人费解。很少有研究考虑到巢雏乞食特征对先前经验的调整，作为解释这些差异的一种可能解释。在这项研究中，我们测试了异质饲养环境对巢雏乞食叫声声学结构个体发育轨迹的影响。52 只斑胸草雀雏鸟被寄养在文鸟或斑胸草雀父母那里，并在巢雏发育的几个阶段记录乞食叫声。声学分析显示，乞食叫声的光谱特征的发育在实验条件下有所不同：由文鸟饲养的雏鸟发出的乞食叫声比由同种父母饲养的雏鸟发出的乞食叫声音调更高，带宽更窄。雄性比雌性的差异更大，而且不能用生长速度的差异来解释。我们的结论是，巢雏乞食叫声可以对与父母的社会互动做出可塑性反应。
