Fehér Olga

Evolution of song culture in the zebra finch

Date: April 4, 12:00-13:00

Location: Stoczek utca 2., St. ép, 320. 1111, Bp.

See the project Olga has been working on:

http://ofer.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/

For her related work see:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v459/n7246/abs/nature07994.html

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v433/n7027/abs/nature03275.html

Abstract

Many aspects of human culture are cumulative: future generations build on the knowledge gained by previous generations in shaping cultural processes. Perhaps the most obvious example is technological development, but other aspects of culture such as the visual arts, music and language also share this cumulative quality. In the animal world, it is widely accepted that some animal species have culture. However, the extent to which animal culture is multi-generational and what cultural evolutionary processes shape it is largely unknown. We used an oscine songbird, the zebra finch, to show that wild-type song culture can emerge de novo, over a few generations in controlled laboratory environments. We created a situation in which rapid cultural evolution allows us to observe it real-time and describe its process in detail. When juvenile zebra finches are raised in isolation, they sing an abnormal, isolate song which differs from the wild-type song sung by wild or colony-raised zebra finches. After describing these differences quantitatively, we used a recursive paradigm to train juveniles with isolate tutors, then, upon reaching adulthood, these pupils trained a new generation of juveniles and so on. We found that young zebra finches learned their tutors’ isolate songs, but in each learning generation, they changed characteristics of the song in ways that made the song more and more wild-type-like. In about 3-4 generations, the songs resembled wild-type songs in both a one-on-one training paradigm and in an isolated colony founded by an isolate male. By describing in detail the rapid cultural process that we observed, we are able to draw conclusions about the possible evolutionary mechanisms that could have accounted for it.