Variability in the male zebra finch song and its role in female mate choice

Abstract

The song of the adult male zebra finch is an example of a learned motor sequence consisting of a sequence of sounds interleaved by silent gaps. As with any motor action, the song of the zebra finch is subject to motor variability. It is interesting to study the variability in the acoustic features of syllables across different renditions of song, since previous studies have shown that zebra finches can perceive this variability. It is hypothesized that consistent songs are an honest signal of male quality, and many studies on other species of songbirds have shown that females prefer males which sing consistently, produce consistent trills, etc. My thesis aims to find out if female zebra finches can perceive variability in song, and prefer male songs which are consistent over male songs which are more variable. Two paradigms were used to test my hypothesis: A preference assay and an operant conditioning classification task experiment. It was found that females do not exhibit a preference for consistent or variable songs, despite having used multiple methods to quantify the preference of the female birds. The setup for the operant conditioning experiment was constructed and works for training the birds, but there are no results from that experiment.